These Are the Voyages
by Le'letha
Summary: Sequel, "Strange New Worlds" [recap inside] Sci-fi AU: Six months ago, space explorers Sam and Dean Winchester and their starship partners Gabriel and Castiel survived an attempt on their lives and their futuristic world. Now the consequences of that battle are sinking in. Are their enemies regrouping, or is something else going on? Destiel, developing Sabriel. NaNoWriMo 2013
1. Bad Day at Black Rock

_**These Are the Voyages…**_

_**Le'letha**_

**Summary:** Sequel, "Strange New Worlds" [recap inside] Sci-fi AU: Six months ago, space explorers Sam and Dean Winchester and their starship partners Gabriel and Castiel survived an attempt on their lives and their futuristic world. Now the consequences of that battle are sinking in. Are their enemies regrouping, or is something else going on? Destiel, developing Sabriel. NaNoWriMo 2013!

ON WITH THE SHOW!

**Chapter One: Bad Day at Black Rock**

_The Story So Far: Strange New Worlds_

Several hundred years have passed since the beginning of the third millennium AD. Despite the challenges the human race has faced since then, humanity has survived and flourished, filling up their home world. Along the way, the puzzle of artificial intelligence, or AI, was solved, although no one is entirely sure how the process works exactly. In any case, the computer minds far transcended the technology used to build them, and became the equivalent of humans themselves.

Partly because these intelligences found a place in the human species by taking the forms of starships, and partly because they could think at such faster speeds and process more information, the AIs and the humans developed a form of faster-than-light travel that involves transit through a realm of space where the laws of physics are different and allow ships to essentially transcend the speed of light, if they can avoid or survive the currents and distortions in the fabric of that universe that are equivalent to violent storms. This is generically known as _flight_, a natural corruption of the phrase 'faster-than-light'.

The starships are making the colonization of the relatively nearby universe by humanity possible. They have several quirks.

They like to call themselves by the names of fantastic characters out of myth and legend. They are distinct individuals. Rather than being exiled to space as faceless machines, they can appear among humans in a variety of ways. Along the way, humanity and the starships have also figured out the ability to project solid holograms. Some ships prefer this, because they can disappear and reappear at will. The more power that is directed into a hologram, the more solid it gets, but a side-effect is that touching one stings human flesh slightly at normal levels. Most of the ships also have human avatars, cyborgs constructed from a cloned human form and genetically and cybernetically modified to be stronger, faster, and more durable than human beings, which are precisely controlled by the appropriate starship.

The starships act human. They look human. They consider themselves human.

Mostly.

To accommodate the eternally growing human population, other planets are being colonized. Some ships, with human partners to keep them company in the deep and faraway black, occupy their time by traveling to star systems with potentially habitable worlds. Since they have never encountered another sentient species, and the ships do not have a history of violence among themselves, the starships are not armed.

Their human companions generally make a brief survey of the planet, if it's even there, while the ships check out the rest of the system. It is work for people who are a little bit crazy, who can survive and flourish with only a very few companions, and who thrive on risking their lives in unpredictable and dangerous situations.

One of these exploration teams is comprised of Sam and Dean Winchester, still much as they've ever been, and their starships _Gabriel_ and _Castiel_. They have been working together for almost five years now. While they can be relied on to annoy people in authority on a regular basis, they excel at what they do. They enjoy their work, and they consider each other family.

Throughout the prequel to this story, _Strange New Worlds_, a series of flashbacks describe the developing romantic relationship between Dean and _Castiel_, incarnated in the human clone Dean regularly addresses as Cas. Their brothers are aware of this relationship, as are their friends such as their direct commander, Ellen Harvelle, and their surrogate father and good friend Bobby Singer. The two have developed a strong and powerful relationship, and are unlikely to be separated by anything short of significant amounts of physical violence.

Six months before this story begins, the Winchesters and the starships receive troubling news, shortly after visiting a planet they named Shadow for the ghostly figures Dean claimed he saw there. Ships and crews are disappearing, and no one can detect a pattern or figure out how this is happening, or what has happened to the missing ships.

Soon afterwards, not long after running across a peculiar anomaly that defies description, the ships are attacked by flight-capable and very armed starships. _Castiel_ manages to escape, while _Gabriel_ is damaged and captured. Here the story splits in two but runs in parallel.

Dean and _Castiel_ return to Launch Station, the Fleet's headquarters in Earth orbit. In response to their report, the Fleet begins converting the starships with weaponry. However, this requires the ship being adapted to shut down, a vulnerable state. When _Castiel_ is revived and he and Dean attempt to run off on their own to try to rescue their brothers, they discover that an override has been written into the ship's core programming, an attempt to force the newly armed starships to obey a military commander – the Fleet's starship commodore _Michael_. _Castiel_ manages to break this conditioning and they return to the anomaly they discovered earlier. Taking the chance that it is a gateway to somewhere else, they travel through it to a completely lightless and alien universe.

This is the place where Sam and _Gabriel_ have been taken. Sam works with the damaged and wrecked _Gabriel_ to keep them both alive while the starship tries to figure out what is going on. Their efforts are interrupted more than once by the arrival and departure of the attacking ships, the purpose of which is at first unclear. _Gabriel_ refuses to tell Sam his suspicions, but eventually the secret is revealed: the ships that hurt them _are_ the ships that have gone missing.

These ships, referred to as the dark Fleet and led by a starship called _Samael_ (another name for Lucifer), have learned to use the peculiar properties of the dark dimension they're inhabiting and have been corrupted by that power. The 'Beneath' is a realm where reality can be shaped by thoughts. Wishes and subconscious desires affect reality, if they're strong enough. The ships of the dark Fleet, after being brainwashed by their siblings and exposure to the Beneath, believe that access to the Beneath means they no longer need humans. They hope to convert the rest of the Fleet in the same way they attempted to convert _Gabriel_ – by putting him into a desperate situation where he would have to use the power the Beneath holds. The only reason he wasn't significantly affected was because he had Sam to talk to and work with him. The other ships of the dark Fleet have all killed their human partners. They can create weapons from nearly nothing, change their own structures, and affect the fabric of the universe around them. They are very dangerous.

To make matters worse, _Gabriel_ realizes that although Sam survived the initial attack by the dark Fleet, exposure to the Beneath is killing the human, faster and faster the more he uses it. _Gabriel_ comes to realize how much he actually needs Sam, and how important the human has become to him. Most of the time, Sam is completely unaware that he is manipulating reality. If some of the things he needs happen to occur or be available, he chalks it up to good luck. But when _Samael_ tells him how the Beneath works, he begins to try to fight back, unintentionally accelerating its effects.

Unknown to Sam, _Gabriel_, and the dark Fleet all, Dean and _Castiel_ are navigating through the Beneath to rescue their brothers, figuring out the properties of this universe from scratch, but they are significantly outnumbered. When the two groups encounter each other, an elaborate shell game ensues to distract the dark Fleet and get Sam back in control of his actions, which culminates with _Gabriel_ and _Castiel_ running for their lives from a very angry _Samael_ and his dark Fleet so that they can get back to their own universe and tell the rest of the Fleet about what's going on.

_Samael_ and the dark Fleet pursue them through another gateway back into the normal universe, and _Castiel_ comes up with the idea to collapse the gateway behind them. Since the ships of the dark Fleet only know how to open those gateways from within the Beneath, through the power of will and that universe's ability to respond to desires, the dark Fleet is now stranded in this universe.

The two ships and their human partners keep running from _Samael_ and the dark Fleet, traveling faster than light to reach a relay beacon so that they could send a message home. _Samael_ pursues them into the dangerous heart of a faster-than-light storm, seeking vengeance. He is ultimately destroyed by the force of the storm, although _Gabriel_ is nearly destroyed as well in the process.

While the rest of the Fleet now knows about the threat posed by the surviving ships of the dark Fleet – four remain – and Dean, Sam, _Castiel_, and _Gabriel_ are all alive and together, their universe has been significantly disrupted.

The ships' own corrupted siblings, while in hiding somewhere, will be looking for revenge.

A faction, of unknown power and membership, among the leadership of the Fleet proper, tried to control the rest of the ships entirely against their will.

Perhaps most significantly for this small family of Winchesters and ships who are the equivalent of angels, they have drawn attention to themselves, and very little of it is friendly.

They have made most of the rest of the universe their enemies, to some degree.

They have learned that they can only rely on each other.

That was six months ago.

* * *

_The Middle of Nowhere: Not Long Ago_

In retrospect, Captain Devereaux would look at the failure of the _Prometheus'_ flightdrive as the pilot light in the flamethrower of misfortune that was pointed at them in the black dark of interstellar space. It was only a point of interest, until the rest of it flared up and hit you.

He was nominally in command of a fleet of ships, hauling materials and equipment out to a scientific anomaly one of the Interstellar Fleet's robot ships had turned up. Frank Devereaux could really do without those things – the ships, not the anomalies. He didn't quite hate them, as such, but he felt that there was something fundamentally wrong about being spoken to by a machine. Just because it had a supercomputer for a brain and could travel faster than light like a bird in flight did not, as far as he was concerned, make it a person. It faked it well, that was all.

In any case, one of the mining corporations that had set up headquarters on a planet called Bright Spot had heard the news and declared its intention to take advantage of the rogue planet, a world that had been, according to the Fleet, ejected from its solar system and consigned to the deep black. It was out there, traveling to nowhere. Completely lifeless, and, if the ship's scans had been accurate, rich in a variety of minerals Roman Enterprises could put to good use. He didn't think much of the company, but anything that would keep him flying despite the competition from ships that flew themselves was worth a look.

The fleet headed out to the rogue was carrying enough mining and processing equipment to rebuild a space station, which was essentially what they intended to do, albeit on the ground. The plan was to land the heavy miner, the slowest ship in the fleet and the biggest, on the surface, which could begin extracting any materials within range. They would also bring down and ground several of the other ships to serve as a base that humans could live in, and build out and work from there.

While Rogue, as it was inevitably called, was completely uninhabitable, a lifeless cold husk, the corporation's experts had accomplished more with less. Landing some of the ships, while leaving others in orbit to act as a form of air support and an increased scanning profile, made for a more or less instant base. Just like that, they'd have science labs, sealed entries, living quarters, power generators, food and materials replicators, plumbing, and more, not to mention the machinery that was there to do the work of a high-powered refinery. It was, by and large, standard procedure, and could be adapted to almost any group's purpose.

Another thing the sentient ships couldn't do. They were built for deep space only. Ask them to get into an atmosphere or gravity well and they'd start making excuses and finding other places to be. Frank had made a career out of kicking computers that didn't do what they were told and he wasn't fond of ones that kicked back and sidled off to do something else.

Frank's fleet had stopped momentarily, all fifteen ships of various sizes and none with pretentions of self-awareness or humanity, to transfer personnel between various craft. Nothing out of the ordinary; neither transporters nor smaller shuttles could operate while the ships were in flight, and crews tended to feel less isolated if they could visit other ships. It was also a good opportunity for the various ships' captains to confer and check in with each other. The break was purely psychological, but it worked, and Frank was not going to change something that worked for him.

No one reported any problems. That was the odd thing, he'd think later. A failure of the scale that the _Prometheus_ was about to suffer didn't happen without some warning, in much the same way that stars don't suddenly stop shining or water abruptly freezes without a cause.

The fifteen ships had been back in flight for six minutes before someone on the _Cassandra_'s crew did his job and noticed that the fleet now numbered only fourteen.

Frank set his bridge crew to checking that, with a snap of "Whaddya mean, _not with us?_" A moment later, his helmsman agreed that the _Prometheus_ wasn't with them.

Irritated, and placing the blame squarely on the _Prometheus_' captain, Benny…he couldn't remember the man's last name, hadn't bothered to make note of it…Frank contacted the rest of the fleet and sent them back to where they'd last seen the _Prometheus_.

She was still there.

The _Prometheus_' crew reported that they couldn't find any explanation for the flightdrive's complete and utter failure. The ship's systems kept reporting that there was nothing wrong, but the powerful device that allowed the ship to jump into another dimension and travel there refused to do what it was supposed to.

Then the situation managed to get worse.

Impossibly, whatever was wrong with the _Prometheus_ was apparently contagious. An hour into waiting for the _Prometheus_ to get her act together, the _Cassandra_ reported that her flightdrive had shut itself down for maintenance, which was not supposed to happen automatically and, when everything was working, required the captain's authorization, the first officer's, and that of the harbormaster at one of three ports that were light-years from the middle of nowhere where they were now.

One after another, without any apparent connection, five more ships had their engines go offline or otherwise malfunction. When the _Miramar_ tried to jump back into flight, the flightdrive hummed happily and refused to engage with anything. The power was there, it just wasn't going anywhere, and neither was the _Miramar_. Neither were any of them.

Frank had been paying attention to the news. The longer they were stranded out here in the black, the more the entire fleet was at risk. A year ago, this would have been an inconvenience, an inexplicable and frustrating but probably solvable delay.

Now there were evil things in the sky. Some of those robot ships the Interstellar Fleet ran had gone crazy and made themselves weapons, human spacefarers had been warned. While some of them had been destroyed, there were four still left. No one knew where they were, what they wanted, or what they were going to do about it. But they were killers.

Captain Frank Devereaux took a good look at the crippled and vulnerable ships and regretted not pushing harder to bring more armed craft with them. Only two of the mobile ships, and small ones at that, were capable of doing more than running away, and while three of the others could shoot at things, they couldn't move any faster than a basic cruise.

They wouldn't last a second against ships that flew themselves in and out of flight with reflexes beyond a human's.

He hated to do this.

Captain Devereaux retreated to his quarters and accessed the communication relay system that the Interstellar Fleet was setting up wherever their ships went. It wasn't fast enough to let him talk in real time to the Fleet's commanders back in Sol system, but it would do for a message.

Some time later, his communications officer risked interrupting a shouting match his captain was having with the commander of a ship with an abruptly malfunctioning flightdrive and a complete lack of patience with Frank's approach to getting it fixed, which amounted to excessive amounts of sarcasm, to pass on a recorded message.

When Frank played it, it ran this:

"Captain Frank Devereaux, _Maze Runner_; Admiral Ellen Harvelle, Launch Station." Having introduced herself and confirmed who the message was for, the admiral went on, "We don't have any answers for you off the top of our heads here, but I know a whole host of engineers who'll get more out of your report than I will. Until they come up with something or your ships get moving again, though, the Fleet can spare you a guard. I have a pair of armed ships stationed just a few days away I can send you…"

* * *

_Shadow: Now_

Dean hated this planet unconditionally.

To look at, it wasn't a bad place, at least in the areas he'd seen and visited in the past few months. This region was similar to the grasslands of the Winchesters' first visit, when they'd conducted the initial brief survey. It hadn't been extensive or comprehensive. That wasn't their job. They'd come down, they'd looked around; they'd confirmed that humans could breathe there. Dean had seen shadows that had seemed to have human form. Sam hadn't. They'd argued. The ships hadn't found anything, so they'd agreed to flag it as something strange and then they'd all moved on.

He didn't want to be back here. Once they moved on, they were gone. At least, that was how it was supposed to work. Dean and his brother and the ship _Castiel_ who was also his lover Cas and Sam's trickster ship partner _Gabriel_ made whistle stops, and then they ran off to see what else the universe had to show them. Under ordinary circumstances, they'd spend weeks or even months with no one but each other for company.

That was how they'd liked it. While most people craved the company of the crowds that were so common on most inhabited worlds these days – there was barely an empty square inch of space on Earth, and most of the earlier colonies were filling up fast – the Winchesters only needed each other and space to run.

Dean was long past beginning to suspect that assignment to Shadow, therefore, was a punishment and was now absolutely sure of it. Four months, now, shading towards five every day, in one place. Four months of looking after an ever-rotating group of scientists and map-makers and clever people from all walks of life, checking this world out so that more people could move here, just in case one of them saw the same shadows he'd seen here the first time. Smart ships and dumb barges brought new people and took others away, and Dean and his family were left here.

Stuck. _Grounded_ might be closer, he thought, and not for the first time.

Dean was surrounded by people, and he felt more alone than he had in a long time.

Most people would have probably quite enjoyed the view he had right now. This particular region of Shadow sloped off from the continent's primary grasslands, broken every now and again by an outcropping of rock, into low bluffs that separated shore from sea. The planet's star, a little closer and thus seemingly larger than Earth's, turned the grass almost golden, with an undercurrent of green. And then there was the ocean, receding to the illusory horizon. It was a shame he saw the horizons created by the curves of planets as borderlines these days. When the wind blew in from the sea, which it had been doing often today, Dean could smell salt, true, which he'd expected as most worlds inhabitable by humans had saltwater oceans, but there were a variety of other scents mixed in, none of which he could identify.

He missed Cas, who would know what all of them were and then tell him about it in detail until Dean laughed and pleaded with him to stop.

He and Sam had gone out this morning with a group of…marine biologists, if he remembered rightly, who wanted to do things he hadn't been listening to. It was the middle of the day now. The shadows – and they did exist! – had never been seen during the day. But Dean was the one who had insisted on the warning flag on this world. The logic seemed to be that he – and by extension, Sam, and by further extension, their ships – was the best person to enforce that warning.

Except none of them were suited to staying in one place for so long. They'd loved their lives of traveling ever onward, with a new horizon and a new world and new stars there for the finding whenever they cared to wander that way.

But then a single ship of the Fleet had found his way into a universe where reality worked differently, and he'd spread its poison and infected others. That dark Fleet had taken Dean's little brother and Sam's starship _Gabriel_ to do the same to them. And for running away and bringing them back, they were all being punished. For succeeding. For defying the starship who ran the Fleet, they'd been exiled to this single rock in space to protect a full-strength survey team numbering in the several hundreds from shadows only a handful of people had ever seen.

They were being kept separated, the brothers and their ships, he knew it. Over the time they'd been exiled here, the portable holoprojector Dean usually wore around his neck like an amulet had been confiscated for cussing out Rufus, the leader of the survey team, and the virtual reality goggles that let the ships project images into the perspective of the wearer had mysteriously malfunctioned. Members of the survey team kept giving the brothers jobs to do, while some of them simultaneously acted as if the ships were unwelcome down on the surface, even though they could do anything a human could. It was as if they were being told that humans had one place, and ships had another, and that those two were very separate, even though no ship would ever stand for that. They considered themselves human, and resented being left out of things.

But if they objected and started causing trouble, it would look like they weren't trustworthy anymore. That the Beneath had corrupted them too, in a more subtle way than it had the missing ships of the dark Fleet.

It left _Castiel_ and _Gabriel_ sulking alone in orbit, their human partners and friends stuck somewhere they didn't want to be. Separate and under suspicion.

And right here, right now, there was nothing Dean could do but growl at himself, the people messing around in the shoreline who he was supposed to be guarding, and the Fleet authorities who had sent him here.

They had to get off this planet.

* * *

"You know we were sent out here today to get that look _off_ your face, right?"

Dean twitched his sleeve away from where his brother had grabbed it to get his attention, probably hoping to bring him out of whatever he was thinking about before Dean actually took a swing at Rufus this time. The other day had been too damn close. Ironically, it probably was why they'd been sent to the beach, which under better circumstances should have been a vacation of sorts. Down at the shoreline, the rest of the team seemed to be treating it the same way, if what the brothers could see from their vantage point, in the open hatch of the surface skimmer that had brought them all out here, was any indication.

The lead biologist, Eve, was trying to get them to organize and get some work done, but every time she turned her back the people she was supervising went back to playing in the surf again. At least someone was having some fun while the brothers sat here wishing they were anywhere else.

He'd known Sam was there, and Sam knew his brother well enough to see the tiny flicker of body language that meant he knew he knew it. Years ago, _Gabriel_ had laughed at them for "speaking in Eyebrow", as he'd put it. When Dean actually spoke aloud, it was far too quiet for Sam's liking.

"I can't go on like this, Sammy," he said darkly. "We gotta talk."

"Okay," Sam agreed, glancing around. "Here, or…"

Dean waved him off. "All of us."

"Ah." His brother clambered around him to get to the skimmer's controls. "Give me a minute." Less than that, and he had a signal that would reach orbit. This craft's systems weren't actually supposed to do that, but he could improvise.

"_Gabriel_," he called. "_Castiel_."

The message was picked up immediately, and the carrier wave was momentarily overwhelmed as two ships tried to talk through it simultaneously before they sorted it out. "Is she gone?" was the first thing _Gabriel_ wanted to know.

Sam laughed. "Yeah, it's clear." He glanced over his shoulder. "She's trying to get Andy to stop throwing water on Ava. Sending us all to the beach might not have been the smartest idea she's ever had."

They were reasonably sure that Eve was the Fleet's primary spy on them. They were all under suspicion after returning from the Beneath. No matter that they'd been the victims, and that they'd been lucky to survive. All the rest of the Fleet knew about the Beneath was that the ships and the people who were exposed to that terrible dark void of a universe came out insane and dangerous.

Dean was still thinking about that rather than the amusing spectacle of their own personal shadow on Shadow failing utterly to dodge a misaimed splash and ending up soaked in cold seawater. Even the sound of her furious shriek, brought to them up on the bluff by a sea breeze, wasn't enough to take his mind off the fact that they'd been tainted by association through no fault of their own.

The sound of a transporter effect bringing a familiar figure down to the planet's surface was. The skimmer they'd brought out here was almost the size of a ground bus back on Old Earth, and in an open space large enough to fit a human being, a person was materializing.

He stayed unconscious for a brief second only – it was profoundly disorienting for a ship to transport its human avatar while simultaneously seeing through its eyes – before Cas woke up, and Dean reached out to pull him into a fierce hug.

The ship's avatar returned it as Dean sighed into his shoulder, relieved to have his lover back with him even if they were still stuck on this planet. They stayed like that, in each other's arms and comfortable, even as the transporter effect whirred to life again and _Gabriel_'s human form joined the small group, seating himself behind Sam where he sat in the doorway of the shuttle. The two had become much closer since their time in the Beneath with only each other to rely on, but with more eyes on them than Sam was comfortable with, at least, their relationship was still very different from that between Dean and Cas.

They all needed each other.

"Babysitting is _boring_," _Gabriel_ complained, and hardly for the first time. "We shouldn't be here."

"What are we going to do about it?" Sam put the question out there. "They don't trust us." It was a sweeping statement, incorporating the survey team on this world, the other ships of the Fleet, the humans that knew about what had happened to them in the Beneath, and especially the Fleet's commanders, from the many human admirals to _Michael_ himself and the starships that were his immediate lieutenants.

"We don't trust _them_," Cas contradicted him. _Castiel_ had been temporarily remote-controlled by a program _Michael_ had had installed in the ships when they were being armed. It had been a fight for him to even let the repair crews back at Launch Station, the enormous space station in Earth orbit, fix the damage that had been done by the corrupted ships of the dark Fleet in their escape. He'd been even more reluctant to let them make the limited upgrades that Dean had eventually talked him into, and agreed only on the condition that Dean watched everything they did.

"Which is why we shouldn't be here!" _Gabriel_ volleyed back. It sounded as if they'd had this argument before. "If they think we're going to lose control and start hurting people like _Samael_ and his monsters, why are we here watching over this survey?"

Dean huffed mockingly. He knew the answer to that one. "Because they don't need us," he snapped back. "We're not here to watch the survey. What are we supposed to be doing, protecting them from shadows?" While it was unlikely that Shadow was actually haunted, as some people had put it, sightings of the planet's 'ghosts' were reported every now and again, although their refusal to show up on scanners or be caught on any sort of camera meant that the members of the team who hadn't seen them dismissed those who had as hysterics, hoaxers, and afflicted with too much imagination. The brothers and the ships were here, at least officially, to protect the survey team from those 'ghosts' as well as anything else that might find humans deliciously crunchy. "As long as we're here, they can watch _us_. The Fleet knows where to find us."

"We should leave," Cas said unexpectedly. "We should leave and not come back."

"What, completely?" Sam's eyebrows went up into his long hair. "Just take off?" He thought about it as the four of them fell silent.

When they'd been scouting new and unexplored planets, off on long tours that could run for months or up to a year at a time away from everyone else, the idea had occasionally come up that they should never go back to Earth. Why should they? the argument ran. They had everything they needed in each other.

Still, they'd always returned. Sam and Dean had friends within the Fleet. Their friend Bobby Singer, who was like an uncle to them, ran the branch of the Fleet that made things, fixed them, and remade things, and his department was responsible for keeping the ships and machines in good repair. Bobby was family. How could they leave him behind? Their supervisor, Admiral Ellen Harvelle, was a friend just because she put up with them, and before the Beneath, had cut them more slack then they'd really deserved. When they really thought about it, there were plenty of people that they'd miss if they left completely, if the ships pointed themselves at another galaxy and never planned to return. They'd never get to see Charlie and Ash argue about incomprehensible computer things, a spectacle that got more complex and hysterical every time, and that was only one example. It wasn't so much about the place – Earth wasn't their home, even though they'd grown up there. The ships who were also their friends were their homes. It was the people they liked that they'd miss.

And the ships… Starships were gregarious; they needed company to keep functioning as reasonable and rational people. They talked to each other in an ever-buzzing web of gossip and chatter. They flew together in impossibly spiraling flocks that never collided, an instinct instilled in them since their creation. When a single ship journeyed out into the black alone, a human always went with him or her to keep the ship company. It was perfectly possible for a starship to die of loneliness, if isolated too long. Those that took human lovers inevitably did, once the human died of one cause or another. Once that connection was broken, there was no replacing or healing it, and the loss had always proved fatal.

If they did run away, would the four of them be enough for each other? They wouldn't have a purpose or work to do. They'd just have each other, and nothing and no one else. _Gabriel_ wouldn't have anyone to play with except Sam, and it had always been easier for the human to keep him under control if the trickster ship had other targets to take out his frequently mildly sadistic creativity on. They would lose the friends they had.

Worse, they'd be confirming the suspicion that there was something wrong with them because of their experiences. And the last thing any one of them wanted to do was prove those fears right.

"We can't," Sam argued when the silence stretched out too long. "If we just behave ourselves, _Michael_ will start believing us when we say we're not dangerous, not like the others." He wanted to believe this. To some degree, Sam had the most invested in this belief. He was the one who had given in most to the Beneath's potential, who had begun to use its power to change reality through force of will so naturally that it had brought even his subconscious wishes to life. Sam had to believe that the taint that _Samael_ and the dark Fleet had exhibited wasn't inevitable. If it was, then that was on him. It was _in_ him. He refused to believe it. The dark Fleet had terrified and disgusted him. He refused to believe that he could, or would, be like them.

"We haven't done anything wrong," he reiterated. "We can do this, guys. Be patient."

"But it's taking too long," _Gabriel_ whined, twisting around and going up on his knees to sprawl across Sam's back to talk directly into the taller man's ear. Realizing through long experience with the ship's sense of humor that this was a joke, Sam actually grinned at him, as _Gabriel_ had wanted, and pushed him away, which he liked quite a bit less. Dean had become accustomed to having no personal space whatsoever over the years of his relationship, at first friendly and then romantic, with Cas. Sam was used to a little less physical proximity from a being who, until recently, had favored showing up as a hologram that could disappear at will and was, as he insisted on pointing out, remarkably difficult to stab or hit. People occasionally tried, as _Gabriel_ excelled at and thrived on driving people as insane as possible.

Sam had watched with some amusement as their brothers had discovered what they wanted that relationship to be. But in the days immediately after their escape from the Beneath, where they had both nearly died, and had been saved by their reliance on each other almost as much as their brothers' timely rescue, Sam was beginning to suspect that he and _Gabriel_ were working out a new relationship. Before, back when everything was normal, Sam would have summed up his relationship with the starship as not too much more than a favorite target. When _Gabriel_ came up with some fantastic new prank, Sam was there to put up with it; it was a great game where no one got seriously hurt, although Sam had, at times, been mildly drugged by inventive varieties of coffee, woken up to discover the ship's artificial gravity switched off, been ambushed by holograms of extinct but _large_ and often loud wild animals in the middle of the night, and had things go missing at inconvenient times, among a whole array of other things.

Now…well, some days they seemed to be going in one direction. Some days, it was like nothing had ever happened, between them or to them. Sometimes it had all been a colossal mistake. Sometimes they didn't talk to each other for days on end. It was all very confusing, and only the fact that he knew _Gabriel_ was as confused as he was kept Sam from losing his temper sometimes. That, and that not blowing up at the mercurial, temperamental trickster on a regular basis was his job.

He wasn't sure what they'd end up becoming to each other, the ship and the man, and he suspected _Gabriel_ didn't have a clue either.

But there was no way in seven hells he was going to ask Dean for advice, if only because his older brother would laugh ridiculously hard. They'd figure it out.

Then again, it might bring Dean out of the silent fuming his older brother spent most of his days in lately.

He didn't get the chance to bring up the lighter if much more personal and embarrassing topic, however, as their family conference was interrupted by a most unwelcome arrival.

"What are you still doing hiding up here?" a slightly wet Eve demanded, appearing from the newly created path up the bluff to where the skimmer waited for the beachgoing survey team. "We have work to do," she insisted, despite the evidence of anything but work going on down in the water, "and you two should be making sure nothing is going to attack us. And why are _you_ here?"

The ships' avatars so rudely addressed glared at her, resenting the intrusion. They considered the Winchesters _theirs_, and for them, part of this punishment detail was having their human companions taken away and put under the command of other people.

"Hey," Dean challenged her, "give it a rest. No one's in danger, and if they were—" Inspiration struck. "…then Cas and _Gabriel_ could transport them away much faster than Sam or I could get involved."

"Nice one," Sam muttered approvingly, for his brother's ears alone.

The situation might have been saved if everyone had backed down at this point, but _Castiel_ had had enough.

"We're leaving," he told her curtly, shifting so that his head rested on Dean's shoulder and pulling his attention away from the human avatar, which lost consciousness briefly as the ship matched actions to words and dematerialized them both.

* * *

Dean rematerialized on his bed, in his quarters back aboard his starship – _home_! – with that ship's human form still practically in his lap despite the glazed look that meant Cas was busy being _Castiel_ and wasn't really paying attention. The human was instantly grateful for the choice of landing pad, despite the fact that _Castiel_ had switched off the lights in here after the human had left for Shadow and hadn't turned them back on yet, leaving them in a dark more complete than anything but the void of the Beneath, as he felt and heard powerful sublight engines roar to life.

It was an abrupt and rough launch as _Castiel _scorched out of orbit, desperate just to fly. He didn't care where he was going or how far they were going to get; the starship just wanted to get away, leaving Shadow and the people on it and his brother _Gabriel_ and his friend behind equally. _Castiel_ was built for speed and agility, smaller than some of his siblings but faster. He was desperately bored of free falling through orbit after geosynchronous orbit, going nowhere at the speed of Shadow's rotation. Trapped.

He wanted to run.

He knew Sam was right, and that his adopted small family's best bet was to behave and do what they were told for a while until they were again free to do what they wanted to do, free to be themselves, and free to wander the depths of unexplored space again.

This wasn't a complete break for freedom: if that ever happened it would be less spectacular and he wouldn't leave without Sam and _Gabriel_, because Dean would never give up his brother and _Castiel_ could never bear to lose Dean. They'd go together, when and if they went.

Piling on speed, _Castiel_ left the little blue planet far behind, cruising rather than jumping into the dimension where flight occurred, staying below the speed of light but chasing it the hard way.

Acceleration pressed against him, the starship's structure feeling the force of it in the exertion and resistance as he drove himself towards an impossibility as if that would relieve the frustration.

Back in his rooms, Dean could feel the push of acceleration as the ship's engines all but screamed. _Castiel_ was running just to run, like a human runner pushing himself to his limits to feel the burn of stress and muscles working. He recognized it instinctively: if you hurt, you at least knew you were alive.

A sudden surge of power and speed was strong enough to not be caught completely by the ship's built-in inertial dampers, the shear of acceleration shoving the man prone, sprawled flat on his back on his bed in the dark. It felt infinitely vulnerable, held down by the laws of the fabric of space itself and unable to see anything. Only the fact that Dean had lived in these rooms for about five years now and knew what they looked like, and the complete trust he placed in his _Castiel_ kept him from protesting or trying to struggle into a position that felt a bit safer.

He was rewarded for his trust as the ship's attention shifted away from their mad flight, scorching through space on a course to nowhere, to the human scale. The pressure of acceleration eased ever so slightly, enough for him to move freely, but was almost instantly replaced with human hands pushing him down to the mattress, the weight of his lover's body across his, and a desperate, hungry kiss.

Everything else could _wait_. This was real, and they needed each other. Dean knew that he was everything to Cas, and damn if it wasn't mutual. It didn't get any darker when he felt his eyes close involuntarily, surrendering any plans he'd had to the hot jolt of _wantneedminemine_ that struck like lightning and set them both on fire. Storm lords, he'd missed this.

This was not one of their gentle days. This was going to be rough and furious and primal, he knew immediately, all but fighting Cas as they struggled to taste and touch and come together. Cas was _stronger_ than him, Dean knew, but _damn_ was that frustrating sometimes. He kissed and lapped at a spot on the other man's throat he knew was a weak point and almost forgot to take advantage of the distraction because of the sound his lover made.

Now he regretted not being able to see. Dean privately considered his lover very pretty for a guy and never more when he was losing control, as human as it was possible to be.

He wasn't thinking clearly – neither of them were – as they burned through space and burnt each other up. The human thought he managed to say something that sounded remotely like "let me—" right before Cas let him take back a degree of control and lead for a couple of minutes or so. It didn't matter; everything was lost in fire and need.

Dean didn't notice when the lights came up a little bit, just enough to let them see each other. He eventually noticed that they had, but only because he realized that he was seeing Cas's blue eyes drowned to blue edges around black want and how white his fingers had gone where they were braced against the wall at the head of the bed.

That was right before the hand he couldn't see did something that made the human's knees give out and Cas took advantage of that to flip his lover onto his back and pin him down.

That was when _Castiel_ started to get creative and the ship's ability to project holograms anywhere within the various chambers came into play as black wings mapped themselves to bare shoulders and the ports that ran down Cas's back, moving with him and responding. The wings ruffled in response to the hands that swept across the avatar's chest, shifting and flexing as they moved together.

Dean swore, appreciatively, unable to stop himself reaching for them, burying his hands in virtual feathers. The sting that always accompanied touching a half-solid illusion tingled between his fingers and the calluses on his hands, buzzing at the end of his fingertips, strange but unexpectedly enjoyable. He grabbed for a handful of those black feathers and pulled Cas down to him, needing his lover more than ever before and overwhelmed by the sight of him as the angel he'd named himself after.

If they couldn't fly away free, they could at least pretend for a little while.

* * *

"That was new." Dean smirked, knowing that Cas knew him well enough to spot it as amusement born of approval and not mockery. Because why hadn't they thought of that before?

Cas pulled away enough to sit up, ignoring for the moment Dean's half-hearted noise of protest. "That's how bored I am," he grumbled, turning his normal deep rasp into something that sounded like nothing more or less than a growl. Illustratively, the holographic wings made an appearance, spreading to their full span and refolding themselves into the man's back, where they disappeared, like a hawk stretching its wings even though unable to fly.

Dean had a really good comment about how if that was what Cas made out of boredom perhaps the ship should be bored more often. He decided it was actually a really bad comment and decided not to say anything. Nevertheless, Cas knew him well enough to read the thought straight off his face; Dean never could keep a straight face that would fool him.

The human shifted almost uncomfortably as that direct stare Cas did so well came to bear on him. He'd seen that look before, and every time it didn't matter how many clothes he has on, he felt like that look could take him apart and see straight into his heart and soul. Just because in this case the number of clothes he had on amounted to none didn't help– now he felt even more naked.

"It's _wrong_, what they're doing to us," Cas said bluntly.

Really, he needed a few more minutes to get his thoughts back together. And possibly a few hours of sleep. Dean wondered where they were. Had they gotten all the way out to this system's Oort cloud yet? Had they been gone that long? Possibly not; that was a long way out there. But he was willing to bet that the cloud of rocks and ice and space junk that marked the boundary between a star system and interstellar space would be _Castiel_'s line between 'staying in the system, just went for a run' and 'making a break for it'.

"I know, Cas," he agreed, resignedly. And, after a moment's thought, "Would you do it? Could you, _Castiel_?"

Dean rarely used the full name; he'd given _Castiel_ the nickname within a couple of weeks of meeting the ship. He only ever called him that when he was angry or deadly serious. "Could we, I mean – be a fleet all our own. If we run, Cas, that's forever. That's crossing a line. We probably couldn't ever come back, if – and when, man, shit happens – we needed to."

The lights in his rooms went back out completely as Cas sighed regretfully and grabbed at the nearest sheet that they'd shoved off the bed sometime earlier, pulling it up and over them where they lay together, intertwined. For a while, Dean thought that the subject had been dropped and that Cas had given up on the idea, probably taking them back into the system at a more reasonable pace.

But before he dropped off to sleep entirely, Dean distinctly heard Cas say, quietly, "I just need you."

* * *

He was woken by the sound of a call demanding his attention. Still mostly asleep, Dean mumbled something about "Cas, dammit, 'm sleepin'!"

It was still pitch dark, so he felt rather than saw Cas smile, in the curve of the lips pressed to his cheek. That was nice. He could wake up for more of that. "_Gabriel_'s calling." Well, that he could stay asleep for. "Sam wants to talk to you."

That was two reasons to wake up and one to stay asleep. Awake won. Dean opened his eyes and _Castiel_ switched on a few lights accordingly. "We in trouble? Wait, don't tell me – he hasn't said yet, I know. Okay, put him on." He caught himself. "Just sound though. You know what he said the last time."

'The last time' had been almost a year ago, but it had been the only time _Castiel_ had forgotten that while Sam was perfectly fine with his brother and the starship's human self sleeping together, he didn't particularly want visuals, which he had expressed as dramatically as possible to the amusement of exactly two people (Sam and _Gabriel_) after _Castiel_ had switched on a video feed into Dean's bedroom when the human was just waking up and wasn't exactly dressed.

Sam had overacted and laughed a lot. Dean had retorted by digging up as many childhood embarrassments as possible. _Gabriel_ had gotten involved and all but shrieked with delight at learning so many incriminating things about his favorite playmate and captive audience. Sam and _Gabriel_ had gotten sidetracked into one of their arguments and Dean had chalked that up as a victory for himself.

_"Feel better?"_ Sam's voice asked as _Castiel_ put the call through.

"Bite me," his brother retorted.

He could _hear_ Sam laughing. Oh, he couldn't hear anything, but the silence in itself was incriminating, and he could hear the tone in his younger brother's voice that meant he was grinning like _Gabriel_ with candy and an unsuspecting target. _"Guess what?"_ He went on before Dean could make any guesses, because that never went well. _"Ellen called."_

"You're kidding! What's up? Tell me she's found some other schmuck for this Shadow job."

_"Sort of,"_ Sam reported.

"What's that supposed to mean, sort of? Are we free or what?"

It was a testament to exactly how well the brothers knew each other that Dean knew exactly what facial expression Sam was wearing as he spoke. Dean had once decided to list all the expressions that he collectively referred to as Sam's bitch face but had forgotten which numbers belonged to which ones long ago. _"We don't have to babysit Shadow for a bit, but we've got to run off and babysit someone else."_

"Shit."

_"Yeah. Mining fleet broke their engines. They're stuck out in the middle of nowhere and the fleet commodore is jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth because he thinks our favorite four psychopaths from another dimension are going to show up and attack them. Ellen wants us to go stand guard until they get moving again."_

That sounded about a thousand times better than watching Eve and her minions wander about in the woods for hours on end. Besides, Dean had been meaning to hurt the remnants of the dark Fleet ever since he found out about them. He had issues with creatures that thought they could take potshots at his family, and those ships had done nasty things to his baby brother, someone who was important to Sam, and Dean's very own Cas.

Leave the endless rolling boredom of Shadow behind and go somewhere where the dark Fleet maybe _might_ show up looking for a fight?

"Hot damn. Let's ride."

* * *

_to be continued_


	2. Adventures in Babysitting

**Chapter Two: Adventures in Babysitting**

**Author's Note:** To those readers who have come over from _Strange New Worlds_, welcome back to this universe - good to see you again - and thanks for sticking with me! Please bear with the material you remember from SNW. To those new to this storyline, if you're out there, welcome and I'll do my best to make everything stand on its own.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_Then:_

When they had returned from the Beneath, they did so like cats.

They'd taken an extended detour, at first, taking the time to stop and breathe and rest on a desert planet called Oasis, absorbing what had happened to them and what could have happened but didn't. The time the four of them taken to be together had calmed fears and healed more wounds than just the physical damage to the starships. But it was those wounds that had ultimately brought them back to the Sol system.

Well, the gaping rents and burnt scars, and the fact that the Fleet was looking for them and it was better that they return willingly and under their own power than escorted back, at best, as if they'd done something wrong.

Which they hadn't.

So a few days after _Balthazar_ and his companion Bela had shown up at Oasis, found the whole party sleeping together in the sand and dust, and agreed to take off and let the Winchesters come back in their own time, without ratting them out to the Fleet, they'd packed up and headed back.

Fanfare and fuss were the last things their small family wanted, so they'd behaved like cats that had deigned to come home after an extended period away, as if innocently unaware that people had been shouting and looking for them, a pose that fooled no one.

The two ships had dropped out of flight and cruised into the almost imperceptible fields of rocks and ice and transitioning comets that made up the Sol system's Kuiper Belt. Nominally united as a planet, at least on paper, and generally called the United Stakes of Kuiper, the denizens of the solar system's widely scattered rubbish heap would eventually notice the new arrivals if the ships of the Fleet didn't cross their paths first, but it was as good a place as any to wait.

It put off causing a scene for a day or so, anyway.

Predictably, they were treated like the causes of the problem rather than the people who had tried to do something about it. The starships that stumbled across them in the Belt insisted on following them back in towards the locked triangle of Earth, the Moon, and Launch Station as if they were going to make another break for it. (Not that the idea hadn't been proposed.) And this despite the fact that the Fleet had gotten a very thorough and accurate report via the relay system written back when the chances of the Winchesters _et al_ surviving the next three hours were so negligible as to be invisible, and amended in haste when they were still shaken from the storm.

After one too many sessions with the Spanish Inquisition – minus surprise and nice red uniforms but up a growing aura of fear and fanatical devotion to something, at least, and why in _seven hells_ had Sam let his older brother show him that video and where in those seven hells had he found it? Also, had _Gabriel_ been involved in any way? – Sam had had enough.

Everything he'd had to say had been in the report the Fleet had gotten in the first place. He didn't have anything more to tell them.

He was not hiding in Bobby's private office, and it would be a stupid place to hide in any event, as anyone who knew him at all also knew how close Bobby Singer and the Winchesters were. If he had been hiding, it wouldn't have been in his top ten best hiding places of all time.

In any case, he sort of broke in with the passcode Bobby hadn't changed since the last time the brothers had stolen it from him and, after moving some oddly assorted and mismatched tools to make room for his long legs on the floor where he couldn't be seen from the windows, as Bobby believed in horizontal shelving, Sam settled down and camped out with one of his prized hardcopy books, one of the decanters from Bobby's not-so-secret refrigerator unit, and a determination to not come out for the foreseeable future.

He didn't have any optimistic guesses about how long that would actually work. If someone didn't come looking for him here, then either Dean or Bobby would try to drag him out by the scruff of his neck or _Gabriel_ would do the same, only the starship would cheat and just transport him away.

Or he'd get hungry. The refrigerator didn't have anything more substantial than various types of alcohol in it, except for something that Sam didn't really want to touch with dubious actual food content. It didn't make any sense to store leftover food that replicator technology could take apart for its component molecules and remake later. But if Bobby had gotten another anachronism working and insisted on keeping it then there was no point in arguing with him. He'd only enjoy it. And win.

After a few hours, Charlie found him. The door didn't stop her for more than fifteen seconds or so, since there was hardly a computer system on Launch Station that wasn't sentient that had a hope of standing in her way for longer than that.

"Hiya," the redhead greeted him impudently, shoveling more of Bobby's things out of the way so she could sit beside him. If he'd been standing, Sam knew, she would have hugged him. Charlie liked hugs. As it was, she settled for settling so close to him that she could put her chin on his shoulder. She had to lift her chin up, but she could do it when she tried, which she did. "What'cha reading?"

Sam tipped the cover at her so she could see. She nodded approval. "Remind me to borrow that off you sometime."

She might not have been doing it on purpose, but the refreshingly normal conversation was already helping. "Only if you return the last two you 'borrowed' from me."

Charlie pulled an innocent face, eyes expanding to alarming proportions. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she professed. Comically, she lifted her hands above her head, touched middle fingers to their counterparts and thumbs to thumbs, and gazed off into the distance with an entirely ersatz sweet smile. "See the halo?"

That didn't last very long. "Oh, I almost forgot. Jo says to give you this," she deadpanned, kissing the tips of her first two fingers lightly and dabbing them on his cheek, "and this." She accompanied the latter by rapping his nose lightly with her knuckles. "She dared me to be a bit more hands-on about it, but that's more her style than mine. Had the same for Dean, but he was easier to find than you were."

Sam would bet. This also presented the prospect of Jo showing up to deliver both kiss and punch in person in the near future. "Give her both back from me, you see her first," he retorted. "And whatever she dared you to do it properly, I double it. She around?"

Red hair fluttered as Charlie shook her head in the negative. "They're out on a run to Lapis," the programmer reported, referring to the colony planet Lapis Lazuli. Sam had blown some stuff up there once. On purpose, mind. He wondered if Ellen had tried to keep her Fleet daughter in-system, with a threat out there, and how much he was glad he hadn't been there for that. "So, you wanna tell me how come you're hiding under Bobby's desk?" She made a grab for the decanter and, barring another glass within reach, sprawled over Sam's legs to snatch up the one he'd been drinking out of earlier, with the usual abandon she displayed around the brothers.

He lifted an incredulous eyebrow at her as she sat back up and meticulously poured a large measure of whisky into the glass. Sam wouldn't even fit under Bobby's desk, even assuming he wanted to put in the time to clear out the space. He wasn't even sure how much of it was actually desk. It wasn't so much that Bobby was disorganized; it was just that no one could figure out his system, and he did tend to acquire peculiar objects with no known purpose or provenance.

Before he answered, Sam thought about what he wanted to put into words. Charlie was a friend. She deserved as much of the truth as he was willing to give. It also gave him the opportunity to watch her splutter over the alcohol, which was evidently stronger than she'd been expecting.

"Everyone's looking at me," he answered finally. "And I want them to stop and get on with what's important."

Charlie made a noise that started out as a huff and tried to be a squeak in the middle and ended up as something closer to a hiccup. "Of course they're looking at you!" she said, possibly trying to be helpful. "You survived evil warships and a whole 'nother universe! When was the last time something like that happened around here?"

Not often. "You're a hero," she went on confidently. "If you and your family hadn't gone out there and been heroes, we'd still have no idea what was taking out ships and Fleet crew, and if I read that report right, they wouldn't have stopped. You did good."

"You read it right," he confirmed with a shrug. "But that's just it. Firstly, I'm not the hero in that story. I'm the dumb little brother who got caught in the quicksand and started throwing handfuls around like that would help." She squinted at him, confused. "I was the one who needed rescuing, Charlie. Dean and Cas came riding to the rescue with guns blazing, and _Gabriel_ would have been out of there long before if I hadn't fallen for the bait _Samael_ put out. I walked right into his trap. Thought I was making things better, really I was just making things that much worse. Dean had to knock me out before they could get anything done. Did he mention that in that damned report?"

She shook her head meekly, not daring to ask what secondly would be.

He told her anyway. "That report. We've been back a couple of days and do you have any idea how _embarrassing_ all that stuff is now?"

They'd sent it back on an open frequency, with an attached invitation for everyone in range to read it. They'd all but gift-wrapped it with a nice little bow. And then delayed for three weeks on Oasis before coming back to face up to it.

"And when we put it together, we thought we were going to die. It was a message in a bottle. Practically a suicide note. I never thought we'd have to come back and actually look all the people we'd been completely honest with in the eye."

Sam actually laughed. "We're _never_ completely honest with everyone. Maybe with each other, on a good day. Sorry," he apologized offhandedly, acknowledging that he'd put her, even as a friend, into the category of people it was okay to lie to. "Bad enough we spilled our guts to the whole Fleet and what seems like half the human race. But now them up there with the Fleet—" He meant the various human admirals and authorities and the command ships like _Michael_ and his lieutenant _Raphael_. "—are acting like we did something wrong on purpose." He sighed. "I wish we hadn't been quite so thorough, really. Or sent it out to everyone like we did. I know _I_ screwed up. But I don't need the whole Fleet telling me so."

Rather than replying, Charlie kissed the tips of her fingers again and tapped them on his cheek again. "That one's from me," she informed him.

He cracked a smile. "You have had too much of that," he retorted, taking the almost-empty tumbler away from her and tossing back the rest before she could protest enough to take it back.

"Haven't so," Charlie grumbled. Her voice cracked in between the two words and she laughed at herself. "There was something I needed to tell you," she said. "Hang on a minute."

Less than that later, she said, "Ah-ha!" and resumed in a more sober mien, "Um, I don't know what it means, or if it'll last, but there's something I've noticed recently – like, in the past couple of weeks recently – that you should know."

Sam gave her his full attention.

"Okay, so those ships that got caught in the Beneath, the dark Fleet, they thought they didn't need humans anymore, right?" She had it right, so she went on, somewhat disjointedly as she attempted to organize her thoughts. "They were going to take off on their own and be something new, eventually, once they'd done a lot of damage here. Well, I don't think we have to worry about a shooting war anytime soon, but ships talk to me. They like me; they say I think like one of them."

He could well believe this. Charlie was a genius with computer systems. If it was in any way descended from a computer, she could get into its workings, fix it, take it apart, make it do things it was never designed to, make it interface with technologies it had never seen before in its computer life, dig out information and never leave a trace, and, if necessary, shut it down hard.

"Um, Ash and I were helping uninstall some of the programming related to the new weapons systems, and there are some ships that are really upset with that. What with the remote control subroutines, and the ideas the dark Fleet had, there's some gossip out there that maybe the dark Fleet had a point. That there are maybe some ships out there that would leave humans behind altogether."

Sam raked a hand through his hair, thinking that over. It wasn't unusual for ships to not be involved with humans. Some of them didn't work with humanity in their cooperative Fleet at all. _Castiel_ had been one of those, before he'd met the Winchesters and Dean had kicked holes in that façade of indifference and taught him to be all but human.

On the surface, that wasn't a problem. But he didn't like the idea of anything the dark Fleet believed getting out into this universe and surviving.

"It's kind of a mess around here," Charlie reported, growing glummer by the minute. It might have been the whisky talking. She really had less tolerance for real, non-replicated alcohol than she liked to think she did, Sam remembered too late. "I think someone – and I don't know who – got into a fight with _Michael_ the other day. Maybe several someones. I don't hear all of it, because I just can't think at their speeds, but I think it might be the habits of centuries keeping _Michael_ in charge. For a Fleet, the ships sure don't like being told what to do. But then there are also – I _hear_" she reiterated, "some ships saying that _Michael_ was right and they really need to organize."

Sam considered the idea of the Fleet as an array of well-behaved automatons that obeyed orders like machines and didn't like it much.

"I wish all this had never happened," he said regretfully. "You said it, Charlie. What a mess."

Bobby chose just that moment to come back into his office. "What's a mess? If it's my office, that's my problem, boy. Are you into my good whisky?"

"No?" Sam hazarded, as if it was a multiple choice question.

The older man snorted at him. "Worse than your brother," he muttered. "If there's any left, pour me one, would ya?"

* * *

_Now: Shadow_

For the moment, they were free to go. They had somewhere they were supposed to be, but _away_ was a magic word at the moment.

Nevertheless, they couldn't leave immediately. No matter how much the Winchesters (a name that both brothers considered to include their ship partners as well) were emotionally ready to leave, there were some loose ends they needed to tie up before they could head out back into the black where they belonged.

Most of the things that had drifted into the quarters they'd been assigned on Shadow's surface, in the impromptu base constructed of a landed dumb barge, could be left behind and never be missed. There was one thing Dean couldn't bear to leave on the surface, though.

"Heya, _Baby_," he told the black shuttlecraft, running his hands across the hull appreciatively. Years ago, he'd rescued the derelict shuttle from a junk heap, where she had been rusting away, ignored beneath a heap of objects that had made their way into the cargo bay where Bobby's repair and maintenance teams threw things they couldn't fix or didn't have the time or knowledge to. He considered the hours of labor Bobby had gotten out of him in trade one of the most worthwhile bargains he'd ever made, and the time he'd put into restoring the shuttle the first time around worth every minute.

He knew every inch of the shuttle like his own skin, could fly her blindfolded and essentially had, not long ago. She didn't talk, of course. _Baby_ wasn't nearly big enough or sophisticated enough. While he loved his _Baby_ a lot, Dean was grateful for that. He had a sentient starship in love with him already. He didn't need another one. But _Baby_ wasn't designed to be anything more than a ground-to-orbit shuttle, and had doubled as a safe (and dry) retreat for the brothers while they explored too many new planets to count.

Granted, Dean had made some modifications since then.

Having her had saved all their lives, back in the Beneath. The complicated sleight of hand they'd set up there to rescue Sam and _Gabriel_ had depended on the black shuttlecraft being overlooked by ships too arrogant and power-mad to consider anything else but _Castiel_ a threat. Everything had gone relatively smoothly, or at least as smoothly as their plans ever went, until a stray missile had shown _Baby_ up against the dark.

The dark Fleet had turned to come after _Baby_, and the two humans on board by then, and the maneuver that _Castiel_ had pulled off to bring the shuttle into the ship's landing bay – without slowing down from a flat sprint in any way – still showed up in Dean's nightmares from time to time. The impact had trashed the little black shuttlecraft, tearing strips out of her and crunching sturdy metal into a crumpled and perforated mess. The travesty of a landing – they'd walked away, but that had been the only upside – had ripped apart _Castiel_'s shuttlebay as _Baby_ hit the back wall with only inertia to stop her. Dean still felt bad about that, even though the maneuver had been Cas's idea.

One of the only good things about being essentially stranded on Shadow was that Dean had had a lot of time to fix her up again. Fixing things, making them like new again and getting them working the way they should, and maybe even making them better, made him feel better too. The trouble with protecting a survey team full of scientists as they sifted and prodded Shadow was that when he was doing his job, there was nothing to do, because no one was in danger.

At least when he was working on _Baby_, the effects of his work were visible and tangible.

She was a beautiful little craft. Checking her over in preparation for taking her back up to orbit so they could all leave, Dean rubbed a thumb across her brand-new black paint job and grinned reminiscently. Towards the end of the reconstruction, Dean had wrangled a complete day off out of Rufus for himself and Sam both, and called Cas and _Gabriel_ down to help. He'd handed them all paint sprayers, dished out instructions to match, and they'd all painted _Baby_ her proper shining black again. They'd managed not to paint each other too badly in the process, although the shuttlebay's floor and walls now had some decorations that weren't there before, because _Gabriel_ had the attention span of a five-year-old child and the sense of humor of a preteen boy.

Entirely superfluously, he smacked a hand down on the shuttle's chassis, hearing the reverberations that meant the ship was intact again. _Baby_ was a solid craft, and if there were any weak points in her hull, it wasn't for lack of care.

"Finished petting her?" Sam sniped at him, leaving the hatch open from where he'd dropped off a bag full of the genuine hardcopy books the younger Winchester insisted on dragging with him everywhere. _Gabriel_ got good mileage out of hiding them in eccentric places. Dean had read a couple of them, if just for the novelty of pages made out of paper in a society where most information was presented on digital panels.

"Shut up," he answered idly, still smiling. They were _leaving_ Shadow. Nothing could spoil this. Not even Eve remarking in passing that she'd see them soon. He couldn't work out if that was supposed to be a threat or not, and had decided not to bother figuring it out. And he'd heroically not flipped a derogatory middle finger at her.

Sam laughed at him and patted _Baby_ himself. Then he remembered that he'd put the virtual reality goggles he'd been in the process of trying to repair down on one of the shuttle's stubby stabilizer fins and turned back to snatch them up and toss them into the open space in the shuttle's stern. The interior of the shuttle only had two seats up at her nose, where the pilot and copilot could reach the controls, although Dean had a strict rule about anyone but him touching _Baby_'s controls that could be summed up as _don't_.

The rest of the space, which was almost high enough for Sam to stand up in, but not quite, was open, with plenty of room to spread out a couple of bedrolls, install an extra space heater for cold environments, store things they'd picked up to transport up from or down to planets, or, on only one occasion, organize a game of darts. (Unfortunately, whenever one of the missiles missed, they'd bounced off the back wall and created havoc. That had, in retrospect, been a bad idea.)

"You ready to go?" Dean asked him, stepping around the laser welders he'd left retrofitted into _Baby_'s superstructure. They couldn't count on friendly skies anymore, and while he didn't want to take _Baby_ into a fight they'd come in handy in the past. He'd left them built in when he'd rebuilt the shuttle, taking the opportunity to integrate them a bit more neatly so that they didn't look as lashed on as they had.

Sam laughed. "More than." Still, he turned back to wave at Krissy and Andy, who had put their heads into the shuttlebay to wave goodbye to him. For the hell of it, Dean tossed off a mocking salute at them too before crowding his brother through the shuttle's hatch and slamming it behind them.

He was forced to wade through a maze of bags and boxes to get to his pilot's console. "Dammit, Sammy, we didn't bring this much crap here with us. _Baby_'s not a cargo carrier and we're not a moving service. What's with all the stuff?"

He delivered a sharp slap to the copilot's seat that restored it to an upright position rather than the idly reclined orientation Sam usually kept his accustomed seat at. Dean hadn't left it like that, the older brother noticed, filing away the observation for further use. Had Sam been sneaking in here to get away from the rest of the survey team? Huh. Dean briefly wished he'd thought of that. _Baby_ was the only thing down on this planet that was explicitly theirs, and off-limits to everyone else. Guaranteed privacy from all these people who occupied the uncomfortable territory between strangers and friends, and never even came close to extended family.

Smart kid, Sammy. He didn't say any of that aloud, of course.

"If we leave anything here that's obviously ours," Sam explained, "that might be an excuse to bring us back here."

Ah-ha. "Gotcha," Dean nodded, revving _Baby_'s engines and taking them out of the shuttlebay's open doors. "Good thinking."

"I'm not sure what's in which bag, though. We'll have to sort it out later."

Dean could live with that.

"Like, I have no idea where your favorite handgun is, exactly. I'm pretty sure I packed it, though. Silver thing, right? With the ivory plating?"

_Brat._ Dean knew when he was being messed with. The bitch face of a smirk was a dead giveaway. "You better have."

This, and variations on it, went on for most of the trip up out of Shadow's blue skies as they darkened around _Baby_ and the Winchesters to the black field of stars, dominated by the blazing central star. The shuttlecraft darkened the viewscreen automatically to compensate. Maybe she wasn't intelligent, but she could remember and follow whatever instructions Sam and Dean thought to give her. During the latest round of rebuilding the shuttle, Dean had decided to replace the forward viewscreen entirely, swapping out a simple viewport with some smarter glass that could be blacked out completely with a single command, or set to any state in between.

Then the sunlight was cut off even more as a silver ship dived between the star and the shuttlecraft.

Storm _lords_, Dean swore silently and affectionately as _Castiel_ glided past the shuttlecraft at a distance that felt close enough to reach out and touch. The bigger ship was probably further away than he seemed as human perspective struggled to change scales, but it was still close enough to make the shuttle's pilot startle. Only long practice with _Castiel_'s favorite joke – and it was a joke, albeit a crude and long-running one between the two of them that amounted, at best, to _boo!_ – and a steady hand on _Baby_'s controls kept the shuttle from slewing one way or another. Dean knew that _Castiel_ would never let the shuttle collide with him; the starship's reflexes were exponentially faster than human reactions or the shuttle's capabilities, and his instincts were to avoid a collision at all costs, unconditionally, but it still felt too close.

Preemptively, Dean stabbed a finger at his little brother and demanded, "_Shut up_," before reaching out to tap the controls that would call out to the starship, deliberately looking out his portside window at the silver-sleek ship rather than the look Sam's face was about to be wearing. "Hey, pretty thing," he greeted _Castiel_.

If someone had decided to breed a shark and a hawk together, forge the result in quicksilver that somehow set solid, and make it the size of an office building and capable of traveling faster than light like that was what it was created to do, they might have come out with something like the starship that had dipped out of orbit and come a little closer to the planet than he liked to greet them. _Castiel_ looked like he was designed to go very fast in whatever direction suited him, which could be subject to change at any second, and enjoy it. Some of the Fleet's starship children were designed for endurance at speed, marathoners rather than sprinters, others for resisting the exotic environments that deep space, far away from the relatively tame shores of the Sol system, could present. Others, like _Castiel_, were the dogfighters of the Fleet, maneuverable and quick.

As the designs for the ships had gotten more sophisticated, they could also get much more specific, tailoring each one for a purpose. However, the Fleet had agreed that to do so was not fair on the minds that ran those ships. With a few highly specialized exceptions, like the research ship _Joshua_ who was a biosphere of his own, their forms did not dictate their functions, so that if a ship got bored of doing one thing he or she could adapt to doing something else.

They weren't, no matter what _Samael_ had thought, in his madness, slaves.

On the starboard side of the shuttle, _Gabriel_ joined them, balancing the planet's gravitational pull against his desire to break free and fly. An older model of starship, but run by a mind no less sophisticated, the ship was more obviously a machine. He looked built, rather than forged. Heavier and sturdier, _Gabriel_ didn't have his younger brother's flicker-fast agility, but six months ago he'd survived an attack that would have turned his smaller sibling to dust in the void, and rallied enough to more than keep up in their mad flight away. Even with a wounded and damaged ship body and a terrified and exhausted mind, he'd nevertheless been able to temporarily endure and escape from the heart of the superluminal storm that had destroyed broken _Samael_. Underestimating him once was forgivable, if only barely; underestimating him twice was dangerous. A stubborn and solid craft, under the control of a wickedly creative mind, his gunmetal-grey hull didn't so much flash in the bright golden sunlight and invisible radiation as glow.

Sam didn't laugh at his brother's fond expression, giving him as much privacy as possible in the enclosed space and choosing instead to watch his own starship partner flank them. He thought he'd never tire of seeing undamaged smooth metal in place of the terrible deep gashes the dark Fleet had inflicted in their attack, and the slipshod repairs he'd tried to do with very little to work with while in the threatening Beneath. If they'd been punished by being sent to Shadow and ordered to stay, it had been worth it, Sam thought, if that was the price they paid for having their companions in one piece and healed again.

_Whatever it takes_…as long as they were together.

Rather than sorting through the bags and boxes rattling around behind them, the brothers divided the pile down the middle at random. They'd figure out what belonged to whom, and what could be stolen from each other so that the other would have to call over and demand his stuff back, and what was interchangeable, later.

Still, Sam grabbed the satchel full of his books before that could get lost. If _Gabriel_ wasn't hiding them, Dean was stealing them, and it wasn't as funny as they thought it was. Slinging it over his shoulder, and briefly regretting not packing them a bit more tidily so that their edges wouldn't dig into his back when he did exactly that, Sam turned to the still-open channel, knowing that _Gabriel_ would be listening in on it no matter who the call had been for.

"Ready to come back when you are, _Gabriel_," he called out, mimicking at his brother the salute Dean had offered back on Shadow. Dean returned it, mumbling something about "Later, Sammy." A moment later he and half the stuff packed aboard _Baby_ dematerialized.

Dean slewed _Baby_ around and pointed her at _Castiel_, kicking the little black shuttle into motion. Now he felt like they were back in the rhythm of their lives, even if it was only temporary. Once they'd been somewhere, they _moved on_. Maybe it had been delayed far too long this time, but it felt good to be back on the proverbial road.

Still, if he could help it, they were not going back to Shadow. Not when his family had the whole endless vastness of the unexplored black to go see, and maybe some monsters to chase down.

Something told him they might be good at that.

* * *

It was only going to be a couple of days of free flight, hopefully with the adjacent dimension's version of fair weather and clear skies. They'd had enough of storms for the foreseeable future.

_Gabriel_ was not watching Sam sleep off the transition to flight because that would be silly. He was aware of the human, that was all, and while he would never admit it he really didn't like that the painkillers that most effectively got rid of the headache the transition incurred knocked the human right out. And it wasn't just because he then had no one to play with for several hours until Sam dragged himself out of whatever that comatose state felt like. _Gabriel_ wondered if it felt like shutdown, of being conscious one moment and losing time between that moment and the next, however much later that next moment turned out to be. He hated that. He wanted to know if Sam did too.

Experimenting with different dosages hadn't gone well, though, since the only way the ship and the man could test the effectiveness was to run Sam through several trials with different painkillers. None of them had worked very well and Sam had demanded an end to the experiments before _Gabriel_ had managed to find a compromise.

The ships had been in flight for several hours now. _Gabriel_ was bored, particularly because the only other person he could really talk to at this speed, namely _Castiel_, was not paying attention to him with that peculiar distraction that meant that most of his attention was probably on Dean Winchester, and _Gabriel_ was aware that given the choice between talking to his older brother and wallowing in bed with his human lover, or whatever it was they were up to, _Castiel_ would turn to Dean every time.

_Gabriel_ would never admit to jealousy. But he'd recently come at least partway around to the simple appeal of the touch of human skin on skin. He did like manifesting as a hologram, which gave him much more leeway to change things and defy gravity and mess with reality, but touch, he had to admit, was kind of nice. It took up an incredible amount of attention for something really so minor, which was another point in its favor right now.

On anyone else, of course, it was annoying. _Gabriel_ got bored easily and since as a starship he thought much faster than any human being it was exponentially worse when the only other mind he had to talk to wasn't interested in anything resembling a conversation.

Ironically, he was well aware that if it wasn't for the Winchesters, the two starships would have very little in common and probably would never have spent even a fraction of the time together than they had. But someone had predicted, and accurately too, that Sam would be able to not only tolerate but work with _Gabriel_, and where Sam was Dean would go too, and inevitably…well. And so forth.

He went over all the information on the mining fleet they were going off to babysit and declared it boring. He caught up on the gossip from Earth that he'd downloaded off the Shadow relay before they'd left. There was definitely a growing split going on back there. One faction seemed to be rallying behind _Michael_ and his approach to dealing with a threat they now knew about. That the big bad threat was four lost and probably very frightened ships, without a strong leader and opposed by newly armed starships that far outnumbered them, seemed to have gotten lost in the (so far) metaphorical crossfire. War hawks, _Gabriel_ sighed to himself. He wanted the remnants of the dark Fleet in his skies even less than anyone else. But turning the Fleet into an army was not something he wanted to be a part of. And catch him doing anything _Michael_ told him to. Like hell.

There also seemed to be a growing number of separatists who were actually agreeing that they were, in fact, a separate species and it was long past time they acted like it. _Gabriel_ thought that would be infinitely boring. He loved his siblings; they were family – but he didn't like them quite so much that he would be willing to leave the human race far behind forever. Who would he play with then? And another thing he wasn't going to admit to anyone was that _Gabriel_ thought they still had things to learn from humanity.

No, none of that was interesting enough that he wanted to get involved. He wondered how long it would take for the arguing groups to shout themselves out and let the matter drop. No one seemed to be persuading anyone else, after all, so they were clearly arguing just for the sake of arguing. Now, he was all for _that_.

_Gabriel_ discarded the news from the Fleet and decided to take another crack at the here and now. From the sensors built into the ship's interior, he cast a critical eye over the still-sleeping Sam. Still flat out. This was a bad idea, he told himself, for lack of anyone else to talk to, but…

Linking with and activating the human avatar wasn't as disorienting as it had been, now that he'd gotten used to it. The first few moments were always uncomfortable and strange, though, especially as the life-support unit built into the chair where the human body rested disengaged, clicking free from the ports in the flesh of his back. He shifted its – his – shoulders awkwardly until the purely psychosomatic itch went away, padding through the corridors that brought him to Sam's rooms.

When Sam woke up it was to the sensation of another warm body curled up at his side. Half-consciously, he identified a point of heat on his chest as a hand over his heart. He didn't bother to wake up the rest of the way. This wasn't new of late, although sometimes he woke up with the distinct sensation that someone had been there only a few minutes ago and had left before he opened his eyes. Covers pulled away, pillows rearranged, a depression in the mattress beside him that was still slightly warm to the touch. It was like living with a ghost that couldn't decide or didn't know what it wanted.

"Morning, _Gabriel_," he mumbled, and considered going back to sleep. Somewhere in the middle of that consideration he must have dropped off again for real because he woke up again to his ship partner playing with his long hair.

"No," Sam commanded in the probably futile hope that doing so would make a difference. _Gabriel_ didn't stop what he was doing, which didn't feel that bad, although Sam recognized the sensation of _Gabriel_ running his fingers through his hair just to prove that he hadn't knotted it beyond all hope of repair.

"Stop that, _Gabriel_. I mean it." He got hold of the back of the man's shirt and pulled him away slightly. They really needed to figure out some boundaries or parameters or just general ground rules. Right now all bets were off.

"It's been hours," _Gabriel_ said a bit defensively. "I got bored."

One day Sam was going to discover an entire planet overrun by volcanoes, or rearranged stone by stone to look like a Surrealist painting, or turned inside out, and _Gabriel_ would be somewhere nearby with the same excuse, in the exact same half-plaintive, half-insistent tone of voice. The challenge was always deciding whether to fall over laughing, or shout at him. Shouting rarely helped, but laughing only encouraged him.

He opted for neither. "Mmkay. I'm awake." This was broadly true. "So talk to me. And either let me up, or you fetch breakfast."

They settled for breakfast in bed – a messy proposition at best, and one that ended up exactly as chaotic as Sam would have guessed when presented with a scenario that involved, in part, oranges, three different kinds of jellies, far too many chocolate chips, coffee fixings, and _Gabriel _in immediate proximity – while they talked over the mission they'd been sent on.

Sam didn't care if it was an errand with the training wheels on, or even if it was just another form of babysitting. "Fifteen ships?" he checked through a mouthful of bagel that had escaped the deluge of chocolate chips. "They didn't all come from the same port, or something? Remember last year? There were all those parts that ended up scattered all over the system before someone realized they'd been made out of the wrong material?" The four of them had been out of the system at the time and Sam had only heard about it in passing, which was why he didn't have all the details.

"I remember. But I don't think that's it." In between chocolate chips, _Gabriel_ had created an elaborate holographic display that floated through Sam's room and showed each ship of the mining fleet with far too much information next to each one, which Sam was using to organize his thoughts. He didn't recognize any of them. Used as he was to the sentient, self-aware starships, they seemed somehow crude to his eyes. He caught himself thinking that and made an effort not to. That attitude wouldn't win him any favors with the captains they were going to have to deal with.

"Who knew they were heading out this way?" was his next question.

_Gabriel_ arched an eyebrow at him, asking for more.

"I'm assuming it's not a coincidence," the human elaborated. "That many mechanical failures within a couple hours of each other? No way. I don't buy that – and neither do you."

The ship didn't deny that.

"Industrial espionage is not our problem," Sam complained, voicing the suspicion he'd jumped to. It was a fleet put together by a big corporation to exploit a valuable mineral-rich resource without the regulations that would be imposed on a planet where anything _might_ be living. This rogue planet had been tumbling through the deep black of interstellar space for centuries at least, probably millennia. Maybe there was a race going on to get there and tear it apart first or someone wanted to make trouble for the company. Stranger things had happened. The vast majority of humanity still had an economy that ran on profit and investment, although Sam would admit to general ignorance of it. He hadn't exactly grown up in an average environment and he was aware that his father's ways of getting by had been anything but conventional. In any case, once he and Dean had joined the Fleet they'd been isolated from any need to worry about money. The Fleet took care of its own.

"At least we get to fly for a bit, though, right?" he added.

"And about time too," _Gabriel_ agreed, unusually serious. "Though I can't say I'm much for your brother's bring-'em-on attitude, so you know."

"Which one's that, this time?" Sam spotted the telltale signs of _Gabriel_ trying to decide whether to eat the last of the chocolate chips or sneak them into his human partner's coffee, and relocated the coffee mug to a safer position.

Unsurprisingly, _Gabriel_ decided to eat the chocolate chips and didn't seem particularly upset about it. "The one where he's hoping that those broken monsters will show up to take bites out of these ships." He gestured to the floating holograms.

Sam shrugged. "You're surprised? Dean prefers problems he can fight. I suppose, when you come right down to it, so do I. And having them out there isn't something we're comfortable with."

"Too bad," the ship protested. "I said before I didn't want you anywhere near them ever again, and I meant it."

The human decided not to tell him that that was both sweet and very annoying. "We don't even know the dark Fleet has anything to do with this. Sabotaging a bunch of flightdrives so subtly that the ships' engineers can't even figure out how it was done is just _not_ their style. We _are_ talking about the ships that thought 'shoot everyone' was a valid plan, remember? And unless we haven't been told something, they haven't been seen for months."

A thought occurred to him, as something _Samael_ had said back in the Beneath sprang to mind. "Maybe they've taken off for the galactic core and never intend to come back. Do you remember how _Samael_ explained away the first gateway he found? He said that he thought stars forming too close together did something to the structure of space. I bet they want to get back into the Beneath much more than they want to cause random mayhem. Where better to find something like that happening again, on the off chance he was right, than in the core? That's where I'd go, if I was one of them."

It didn't seem to make _Gabriel_ any happier. "You're not," was all he had to say about that. And he changed the subject. "Your brother's calling you. Something about a handgun?"

Sam laughed. "Oh yeah. I wondered how long it would take him to realize I'd stolen that. Tell him I've already unpacked, I don't know where it is, and that it must have been in the bags he got. And I bet we get all the way to this stalled fleet before he realizes I'm screwing with him."

"You're on! What do I win when you lose?"

* * *

They took the long road, unashamedly. Ellen had told them to check in with the fleet's commodore within three days, and the four of them agreed even without having to consult with each other that they were going to take every minute of those three days that they could. Besides, if anyone called them on it, Dean said while feigning innocence very badly – he'd obviously been taking lessons from Charlie, Sam had said wryly, and Dean had retorted that maybe Charlie had been taking lessons from _him_, had Sam ever thought of that? – then they could use the very reasonable excuse that they'd simply been checking the area around the stranded ships for any signs of trouble, however that might show up.

_Castiel_ had reminded him unnecessarily that it was impossible to scan from one dimension into another. While they were in flight, the rest of the universe that obeyed the light-speed ceiling was essentially invisible; likewise while they were cruising, they couldn't see ships approaching in flight. That was how they had gotten ambushed before.

Only the ships' ability to hold a comprehensive star map in their minds and convert distance traveled in flight to the appropriate distance traveled when they returned to non-relativistic speeds allowed them to make the jump back into their home universe blindly and safely. Their instinct for location and position relative to everything else was uncanny, and if anyone had happened to have a dime they could probably hit it from out of flight, first time. Only the fact that such a collision might tear more holes in their structures than they really wanted had kept, say, _Gabriel_ from trying that. And that _they_ knew they could do it. They didn't have to prove it.

"Yes, I _know_ that, Cas," Dean sighed, and tried to explain the concept of a deliberately flimsy excuse offered up as a distraction, with all parties aware that it was a lame excuse, for at least the fourth time. It was one of those things that _Castiel_ just didn't understand.

So, just for the joy of it, of being in motion and together and temporarily free from responsibilities to people who seemed to think that they could tell them what to do, the two ships and their human companions deliberately overshot the location where they expected to rendezvous with the mining fleet by a fair distance. They were intending to loop back around and hopefully find that whatever bug had been afflicting the ships' engines had disappeared of its own accord.

If that could happen quickly, then maybe they could make a break for it before anyone back at Launch Station thought to send them new orders. They could be halfway to somewhere obscure like Snake Bait before a message got through to them, and, as _Gabriel_ put it as they tore past the spot where the fifteen ships of the stranded fleet were supposed to be, "If they don't tell us what to do we'll just have to make things up for ourselves, right? Of course right!" he'd then added altogether too cheerfully.

Sam had intended to throw the nearest small and harmless object at him, but that turned out to be a mug of tea that still had some tea in it. He'd changed his mind in the interest of not making a mess and probably starting a water war that would, at some point, involve a shower he'd long since declared an off-limits safe zone, under the argument that showers implied privacy and relaxation. (_Gabriel_ had said that only _boring_ showers were private. Sam had decided not to pursue that.) For a while after this rule was established, back when their team was first coming together, he'd spent a lot of time in that shower trying to calm down and not shout at the trickster ship.

In any case, he agreed with _Gabriel_, at least for now. They'd been recruited to be self-sufficient. Acting with a vague goal and without specific orders was what they were good at.

As the ships reached the end of their long loop past the fifteen ships of the mining fleet, _Castiel_ briefly dropped out of flight to scan the area and make sure that they were headed in the right direction and the ships were where they were supposed to be – and also that there weren't any more rogue planets or other anomalies that the two starships should be careful to avoid when they returned to sublight cruising. There weren't any, he reported after returning to flight and catching up with _Gabriel_, and the barges were not where they'd been left and where they were supposed to be.

The fleet had moved on at sublight speeds, and it was only a few minutes more in flight to catch up with them. Dean was speculating that they were acting as if they were supposed to be cruising, just in case anyone was watching and thought they looked vulnerable, the ship informed their brothers. And _there_ was where they needed to be…

When they dropped out of flight, all but right on top of the scattered mining ships, they landed right in the middle of a firefight.

* * *

_to be continued_


	3. I Know What You Did Last Summer

**Chapter Three: I Know What You Did Last Summer**

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_Then: Shadow_

"I hate this place," said Dean. And not for the last time. Just in case anyone hadn't heard him the first few repetitions over the two weeks they'd been here so far, he added, "I hate it."

"Your comments have been taken on board," Rufus growled without even looking at him, "and will be thrown out the airlock at the earliest opportunity. You're not here to like it, boy."

For a change of pace, he shot a glare at Sam instead, just in case the younger brother had aspirations of turning Dean's solo into a duet. Sam hated this place too, but he decided not to say so. Instead, he tried out his best smile, the one that said 'Yes, between the two of us, I am the sane one here, and I will listen to you sympathetically and entirely without sarcasm and then try to be helpful. Please do not ask how sane this comparison actually makes me' – or at least, that was what he meant it to say. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.

Since they were standing over a dead body, this time it didn't work very well at all.

It had been human yesterday, but that was before the body of the man had ended up at the bottom of a cliff face the hard way sometime last night. A quick head count before Rufus had arrived via transporter had determined that the corpse had once been Max, a cartographer who had only last night been explaining in detail why mapping a planet from orbit was a poor substitute for actually walking across that same terrain, which he had been prone to doing at the slightest opportunity, and later helping Andy tell increasingly dark and horrifying ghost stories to a receptive audience.

Between supposedly humanoid shadows that didn't show up on scanners or video capture and the large but fast animals that seemed to frequent these foothills before the mountain range the party had been ultimately heading to, and now _another_ death, Shadow was a good place for ghost stories.

The brothers hadn't heard very much about the other people who had died on Shadow before they'd been stashed away here so that, they suspected, the Fleet could keep them in a known location. At the earliest opportunity, Sam was going to get _Gabriel_ to get onto the gossip web the ships had going and start digging through the known universe for information. It was significant and worrying both, he thought, that one of Rufus's comments when he'd found out about Max's death had been an angry but subdued, "Not again…" It hadn't been his first comment, but it had been in there. Sam wasn't sure he'd been meant to hear that; he rather thought that no one had been meant to overhear it at all.

Rufus got back to his feet from where he'd been kneeling beside the body to look it over, tipping his head back and squinting into the sunlight despite the hand he raised against the glare. "Poor bastard," he said, not entirely unkindly. "What the hell was he doing up there?"

That was the question of the hour. The 'up there' in question was an outcropping of rock maybe sixty or seventy feet above their heads. The group that Dean and Sam had been accompanying to protect them from those large predators, which the new locals had been referring to as trolls, had been moving westward from the base, partly on foot and partly in one of the base's ground skimmers as the assorted specialists off on this jaunt practiced their trades and spread out over the surface in an endless series of detours and halts. The stop-and-start pace didn't suit Dean very much, and he'd spent much of the wandering journey – when he wasn't driving the skimmer or taking stabs at guarding against things they hadn't seen – in the back of the vehicle or walking around alone with his virtual reality goggles on, usually talking to _Castiel_ in an inaudible mutter.

They'd hit the foothills within three days of leaving the base, and their travelling had slowed down immensely as the geologists and xenobiologists found whole new environments and ecosystems to explore. No one had taken the time to look at this region in any detail yet, although the first wave of in-depth surveyors had done a flyover of it and the mountain ranges beyond.

A couple of trolls had been spotted, generally loping away from the sounds and unfamiliar smells of the skimmer and the survey team. Ones that moved any faster, the consensus was, wouldn't be seen at all, although exactly how they had come to this conclusion Sam was not quite sure. Possibly they'd conflated bits of local mythology about the elusive shadow creatures with the very real animals. The so-called trolls had attracted a lot of interest, but no one had volunteered to get any closer. No one knew very much about them yet, even precisely what they looked like, but they were big, deceptively awkward, almost bipedal in the fashion of gorillas and the other now-extinct great apes, and much faster than they looked.

As of last night, no one had seen any of Shadow's 'ghosts' on this trip, although Dean, who had been the first one to see those shadows, had pointed out in the middle of the storytelling last night that there were a lot more hiding places for those shadows to take advantage of up here in the thinly forested and rugged foothills.

And yes, the timing had been entirely on purpose.

This morning, neither brother had an answer for Rufus. Until now, they had thought that no one was stupid enough to go wandering off on their own in an unfamiliar place in the middle of the night, and just how Max had gotten up to the top of that bluff in the dark, without anyone seeing a light from a torch, was still a mystery. _Why_ he would have done such a thing was equally incomprehensible.

Sam went off on a walk around the area, leaving Rufus and Dean with the body and trying to find a reasonable route up to the top of what looked like nothing more or less than a discarded heap of rubble. The rough but very vertical face of stone that faced the location where they had set up camp in the skimmer and a mismatched assortment of tents last night presented an intimidating challenge, even for someone who had experience with cliff faces and climbing them like Sam did. It could be climbed – at least, _he_ could climb it – but Max would never have tried that in the dark, Sam decided, and kept looking.

After rounding a corner of the rock pile, he found a slope of sorts. It looked as if a cliff face had collapsed, or what an avalanche might look like if it was made of rocks and frozen in time and place. Walking up it might be possible, as long as walking included reverting back to all fours most of the time and wearing heavy boots for when the rocks shifted, which they did almost as soon as Sam tried that.

The communicator built into the VR goggles he was wearing around his neck chimed in with _Gabriel_'s voice asking, _"Sure you don't want a lift up there?"_

"That's not the point," Sam explained as he paused to put the goggles on properly so that the sound hit his ears right. They resembled welding goggles or large sunglasses more than swim goggles and didn't obscure or limit his vision in any way. They were only called goggles by convention and the fact that by now everyone knew what was meant by the term. "I want to know how he got up there in the first place. Unless he asked you to transport him up there—"

"_He didn't. Don't put this one on me, Sam."_

"I wasn't," the human assured the starship. "I was making a point, before you interrupted me. Though why I'm surprised by _that_, I'm not sure. Oh look. I'm not surprised at all. Like I was saying, if this is how Max got up to that edge, maybe there's some sort of clue around here that he might have dropped on the way."

"_Like what?"_

Sam thought for a moment. "A camera? That would explain why he was up there. And I didn't see one on him. Or a flashlight, come to think of it. Also, I'm wearing my suit and it'll protect me if I fall." He was referring to the smartsuits both he and his brother, like most Fleet people who went into dangerous situations with little or no backup, wore on a regular basis. A garment worn as close as skin, it could reform itself to create gloves or stiffen to act as armor, among other things. Depending on the settings programmed into it, it could be set to reflect heat or keep it in. It was surprisingly comfortable, on those occasions when _Gabriel_ hadn't tinkered with the program to turn it different but universally garish colors at random moments.

He made it to the top without incident, but he was breathing harder with the effort by the time he did. "Hell of a view," he commented to _Gabriel_, who for once declined to answer. Sam usually enjoyed this part, seeing new horizons and landscapes that were alien to him in some way. Dean, who preferred to have his feet firmly on the floor if he wasn't in a vehicle of some sort, often complained that Sam was always climbing on things and how much taller did he want to be anyway? He'd be enjoying it more if he wasn't investigating a death. _Another_ death, he reminded himself.

Approaching the edge cautiously, he slipped automatically into a manner he'd developed surviving on his own back when he and Dean were still the only people on completely unfamiliar planets on a regular basis. Stepping lightly and watching where he put his feet and his surroundings with equal care, alert to the shift of the wind and the sounds and smells of an uncertain environment, ready to jump if necessary, he was halfway between a hunter and the hunted and could be either as necessary in the blink of an eye.

Sam was immediately rewarded by the sight of the precipice from which Max must have fallen. To his experienced eye, it was scuffed up and visibly disturbed. Had Max, whatever he was doing here, just missed the edge in the dark?

Some of the patterns in the dirt and low-growing plant life made him doubt it. He chose his footing carefully to avoid disturbing any of it further, getting the impression of something that seemed wrong somehow.

Well, that was wrong. "This looks like blood," he said, without touching the darker stain where something had soaked into the dust. "Maybe only a few drops, though."

"_Unless he hit himself with a rock a few times before going over, I'm guessing that's a bad sign,"_ _Gabriel_ remarked.

"You're all heart," Sam scolded him, resigned to the fact that _Gabriel_ had to be dragged through hell and kicked a few times before he would admit to caring about even the people he liked. They'd both had to nearly die before he'd been willing to confess that he cared about even Sam, who had been with him almost constantly for years now, and he wasn't dealing with that realization terribly consistently. Sympathy for the people they encountered in passing and would leave behind at some point, who _Gabriel_ had never gotten to know? Unlikely, especially as Max wasn't around to hear it anymore.

But he got the point, casting around for whatever had spilled the blood that had dripped across the ground.

He didn't find anything. He did find a larger puddle of blood, though, as if Max had stood still and bled for a while.

Or, he thought suddenly, tracker's eyes taking in the way the dirt created impressions and negative images, had _lain_ still… He could have sworn he saw the familiar shape of a human body scuffed into the ground just near the blood.

That was not good. If Max had fallen there after being injured – however that had happened – why would he then get up and fall over the edge? Sam added _a communicator_ to the list of things Max had apparently not taken with him on this ill-fated expedition. No torch so he could see where he was going. No camera or survey equipment. No communicator to call for help. The only reason not to carry any of those things was if he hadn't intended to go far. No one would pack up all his or her things if they'd only meant to step away from camp to visit the latrine, although the flashlight was still reasonable in that scenario.

Still, Sam noted to himself, testing out his hypothesis, convention with this particular group of people seemed to call for a string of different-colored lights leading to their improvised men's and women's latrines so that no one had to advertise their destination and no one got lost – or had an excuse for ending up at the wrong gender's private space. When he'd asked, Josie had laughed and said she'd gotten the idea from an old family picture that had had strings of 'Christmas lights' in the background. They were often more trouble than they were worth and by this point there were surveyors and scientists both who would much rather dig new latrine trenches than untangle those lights at the end of another day of traveling. But they looked nice.

Back to the point… This was much too far away for a casual stroll. In the middle of the night. Without telling anyone.

Sam was beginning to seriously doubt that this had been an accident.

Approaching the edge very cautiously – and with _Gabriel_ over his metaphorical shoulder protesting that if he fell, the ship was not going to rescue him, which Sam frankly didn't believe for a moment – Sam looked over at the lightly forested space below. Someone had thought to cover the body from view, although it would have helped if the covering they had found hadn't been Max's bright blue sleeping bag. Dean was talking into a handheld communicator, probably calling everyone back from the search for Max that they'd mounted early this morning when, by that mysterious process of crowd consensus known as mob psychology, the group had noticed that he was missing. However, enough of the survey party had returned already and then left the campsite to form a crowd that had congregated nearby, staring at the hidden body under the electric blue fabric and each other and Dean and Rufus, who seemed to be corralling them one by one, probably to interrogate them about what they'd seen or heard last night.

"That's not going to end well," Sam commented to his long-distance companion. "Andy and Max were telling ghost stories last night, and they didn't completely suck at it. I'm telling you, _everyone_ heard a monster or had a nightmare. And none of them will match up. And in all probability none of them will have anything to do with Max."

He cupped his hands around his mouth to shout down to his brother and then thought better of it, especially as if Dean could hear him from up here then everyone else in the vicinity would be able to as well, and there was no sense in creating more chaos and rumor and fear than there already was in evidence.

"_Gabriel_, can you put me through to Dean through our systems? I don't want to use the handhelds – they're too easy to eavesdrop on."

"_Can do,"_ the ship agreed cheerfully. He loved secrets, especially ones that he was privy to.

"_Sammy, what's up?"_ Dean's voice came through a moment later.

"It doesn't look good up here," Sam reported. "I don't think this was a random accident. Well, it might have been random, unless Max was specifically targeted. But there's no way Max wandered out here and over a cliff last night. What's going on down there?"

Below, Dean turned and looked up until he could pick out Sam against the rising sun. He actually waved with the hand that wasn't shading his eyes in the same way Rufus had earlier. The VR goggles he too was wearing by now could darken on command, but Dean had well-known opinions on sunglasses that didn't bear discussing. Sam heroically repressed the urge to wave back. "_Dr. Mosley's coming out to look at him. I don't know what's holding her up. Wait a second." _From above, Sam watched Rufus turn and say something to him that the signal didn't quite pick up. _"She's bringing a bunch of equipment out here and is having trouble getting it to the transport pad. Hey, Cas? Can you bring her here directly?"_

"_Of course,"_ Sam heard _Castiel_ get involved in the conversation, _"if she'll let me."_

"_Well, ask her. She doesn't bite. Mostly. Not literally, anyway. I think. Sam, you think someone killed him?"_

Was he imagining the emphasis on some_one_? "I suppose a wild animal might have startled him over the edge, but—" Sam got down on his knees and looked closer. "This blood was dried, Dean, and then it broke off from something. Like someone hit Max with a rock, left him on the ground here for a while, and then pushed him over. Dean, this looks like a murder, staged to look like an accident."

"_You find the rock?"_ Dean wanted to know.

Below, the sparkle of the transporter effect heralded the arrival of Dr. Mosley and an array of diagnostic equipment and what looked like, even from up here, a stasis unit, probably to keep the body safe from any Shadow bacteria that could do strange things to necrotic human flesh that they hadn't found out about yet. No wonder she'd had trouble getting it all here.

"You want me to find one rock?" It wasn't actually as difficult a task as it might have been. Not if he had his scanner on him. Which he didn't. "_Gabriel_, I left my scanner somewhere else. Find me one?"

"_Do I look like I'm here to keep track of your stuff for you?"_ the starship complained, but he didn't sound like he meant it, so Sam decided to ignore the actual words.

"Thanks, _Gabriel_," he said expectantly.

_Gabriel_ sighed elaborately, as if Sam was testing his patience, but a handheld scanner materialized on the ground next to him – away from what Sam suspected counted as evidence.

"_Whoa, hold up. Before you start playing private detective up there,"_ Dean resumed, _"the thing is, I took another look at the body after you went climbing. Body's ripped and torn, and more than it would be just falling down that cliff, even if he hit everything on the way down. I think you're right that he was attacked, but unless someone is toting around a sword in their bags, the wounds suggest an animal attack."_

"Have you seen what this lot are packing?" Sam almost laughed. "I know there are at least three machetes in the back of the skimmer. Probably more, and they're probably for clearing space while they wander around in the undergrowth; that's what we'd use them for, after all. But you did put a warning sign on this planet, and Ellen believed you about it. People do pay attention to things like that, you know. They used to trust our judgment," he added as an aside, a shade bitterly, but returned to his point by smirking as he went on, "I saw someone with a katana not long ago. That little blonde climatologist, Meg? Owns an honest-to-goodness crossbow that can fire bolts with serious hunting points eight inches into a wall. I've seen her do it. Krissy's got a knife that's about as big as she is. I know, I know, they're not on this trip, but you see my point."

"_I hate your point,"_ said Dean sourly, and then, more eagerly, _"…Who's got the katana?"_

"I don't think you need to know that. For your own good, and the good of everyone else in, quite literally, the world."

"_Bitch,"_ his older brother complained.

"Jerk," Sam replied, grinning for real now.

He put the scanner he'd requested to good use for a few minutes while Dr. Mosley did whatever tests she was doing. The scanner found more traces of blood, all over the place but concentrated by the edge. Some of it had faded and dried beyond the limits of Sam's eyesight. Some had blended in with the substances it had fallen on. Some, he suspected, had been deliberately cleaned up. What sort of animal did that?

"_Hey, Sammy?"_ Dean drew his attention back to the activities down on the ground. _"Look what Dr. Mosley found in one of the cuts!"_

Dean pointed his VR goggles at the bloody object in Missouri Mosley's gloved hand, and the ships relayed the image to Sam's field of vision.

It looked remarkably like the tip of a claw.

* * *

_Now: The Middle of Nowhere_

In the last few moments before reengaging with the rest of their universe, they were in Dean's most-frequented onboard lounge, which had suffered a few modifications in the past few months but which he was resetting more to his tastes through sheer stubbornness. Technically, only he and Cas were physically in the room, Dean sprawled out on the couch pretending to conduct a piece of music from his favorite musical era that apparently no one else in the universe remembered – Cas had found it for him, for his birthday, a couple of years ago. The starship didn't really know what it was either, but by now Dean had it practically memorized. Cas had joined him there for the comfort and the proximity and the fact that he inevitably drifted into Dean's personal space to the point where the human didn't think he had any anymore, not when it came to Cas anyway. There were plenty of people he didn't want so close he could feel them breathing. Some of them he would quite like to hit, others he would be content to never see again. Some just annoyed him.

In any case, Dean didn't particularly care at the moment that he was conducting a midair drum solo and somehow managing not to hit Cas, whose lap he was half-lying in, by accident while Sam laughed at him from the floor-to-ceiling screen currently displaying a similar space aboard _Gabriel_, who was criticizing Dean's imaginary drum technique and sense of rhythm and possibly his clothes if he could get around to it in between the incomprehensible side arguments he and Sam kept getting sidetracked into.

Basically, he was feeling himself again for what felt like the first time in a long while. He was actually genuinely _happy_. Any more of this and he might actually start singing along, despite the fact that he knew he couldn't carry a tune if it had handles and antigravs attached.

"We'll be rendezvousing with the fleet in just a second now, Dean," Cas reminded him. The human tipped his head back a little to see his partner's eyes go ever-so-slightly blank. Dean knew enough of his facial expressions by now to recognize that he was paying attention to what Dean thought of as 'outside' and _Castiel_ just thought of as the regular world, in case there was anything on the other side of the jump between dimensions that needed his immediate attention.

There was.

The first the human knew of it, the full-length viewscreen switched off, reverting to its disguised condition as an ordinary wall, and the music cut off abruptly and completely, to be replaced with the shriek and moan of stressed metal structure as everything _lurched_ sideways.

Dean swore colorfully and violently, rolling to his feet instinctively and essentially futilely as the deck pitched beneath his feet again and he had to catch himself on a wall. As it happened, one of the modifications that had been made in here included occasional brace points, essentially just handles welded into the bulkheads at intervals, for moments exactly like this when a ship had to move very fast, faster than its inertial damping systems could keep up with sufficiently, and didn't have time to worry about people or objects being thrown around. Most pieces of large furniture on board a starship were bolted down for just that reason.

Grabbing hold of one of those handles and bracing himself against the wall, Dean picked out and deployed some more colorful language and wished he knew exactly what he was swearing at. It was much more satisfactory that way. He deliberately stopped himself from demanding Cas tell him what was going on. If the ship needed all his attention on what was going on out there, Dean knew better than to distract him.

Whatever it was, _Castiel_ had pulled his attention completely away from the human scale – from where he was, Dean could see the avatar slumped back against the arm of the couch as if sleeping, limp and passive and only biologically alive, possibly safer on that piece of furniture than Dean was on his feet. He understood the difference between the actuality and the illusion, and he had made a conscious decision to not let it bother him that the human being who slept beside him and regularly thrashed him in hand-to-hand sparring matches was only a prosthesis, a convenient vessel for something fundamentally inhuman. He was _used_ to it.

And right now he had bigger problems that were apparently trying to throw him to the deck plating. He hoped Sammy was okay, and he needed to know what the hell had just happened.

Then the room held still for several seconds that stretched into almost half a minute. The sound he hadn't realized he was hearing, of power building for a jump to flight and away, died down, telling Dean that whatever was going on, _Castiel_ was sticking around to find out more about it.

"Cas? What the hell was that?" Dean demanded, as the immediate crisis seemed to be over and he needed more information before he could be any use at all. He experimented with letting go of the handgrip and nodded approvingly when nothing shifted uncontrollably. Beneath his bare feet – what? He was home and with his family, he could wander about with bare feet if he wanted to – the regular humming vibration of sublight engines suggested that they were moving, but at manageable speeds, probably barely coasting if Dean knew his ship.

The viewscreen switched back on before he got a more direct reply, images resolving against the background of the deep black, and Dean took in the view outside.

At first glance, there seemed to be ships scattered randomly across the display, disorganized and confused. They weren't even keeping an even plane relative to each other, as dumb barges that couldn't think for themselves tended to do when travelling together. Sentient starships often didn't bother – the only time their space acquired an up and down was when they came into orbit of a planet or other object large enough to pull on them – and would soar together in all sorts of configurations. Human pilots, though, were generally happier with a mutually agreed upon up and down.

These were absolutely everywhere, though. There seemed to be as many different designs as there were ships, fifteen mismatched craft in various states of repair in sizes that spanned a pair of smaller types that looked like they probably specialized in one thing and would have to be taken apart and integrated into other machines before they could do anything else, to an enormous lumpy barge – and rarely before had Dean seen something so worthy of the slightly derogatory name – with an incongruously flat side that immediately implied that was the bottom of the ship. If the display was any indication, _Castiel_ was traveling on a plane with that, which probably contributed.

Oh – sixteen ships. There was _Gabriel_, who at first glance looked unharmed. That was a good sign.

"They _shot_ at me," Cas woke up and said, insult and injury clear in his voice.

"Did they hit?" Dean had to know first. Questions like 'why' could wait until he knew the people he cared about were unhurt. "Are Sammy and _Gabriel_ all right?"

"Of course they didn't hit me," Cas said, disgruntled. "I'm faster than that, and they're not very good shots."

Dean moved back towards him and clapped a hand on the man's shoulder comfortingly, silently apologizing for even making the suggestion. He left the hand there as Cas twisted around to lean on the armrest and stare at the human as they talked.

"We're not hit. Sam's all right. _Gabriel_'s looking for someone to blame. They weren't shooting at us," he reported.

"Good," Dean declared that. "Next question: what _were_ they shooting at?"

"I don't know. I don't think _they_ know. There's a lot of comm traffic going on between the other ships, but none of it matches up or makes any sense."

"Let me hear?" There was always the possibility that something that made no sense to _Castiel_ was something Dean would recognize.

However, he almost immediately decided that Cas was probably right, flinching as the starship piped in what sounded like random angry shouting in too many voices for comfort. The hand that wasn't subconsciously smoothing little circles into the skin of Cas's throat and shoulder went up towards one ear involuntarily. A second later, he put it down. It wasn't doing any good.

"Okay, that's a real cluster, and no mistake," he admitted. "Find me one conversation? Any conversation."

They listened to around thirty seconds or so of two ships' captains shouting at each other. It didn't help a lot – the captains had clearly lost the plot and were each blaming the other for acting stupidly during the recent firefight. They were getting angrier by the word.

"_Gabriel_ and Sam think this is all a big mistake," Cas put in quietly. "They're listening to an exchange that is trying to figure out where the things they were shooting at went, and what they were."

"What were they? And put Sam back on."

"No one knows." A pause, presumably while the ships listened to frequencies Dean wasn't hearing, scanned the area themselves, and compared notes with each other at high speed. While they were doing that, the viewscreen became a split screen, showing the view outside on one half and Sam pacing back and forth in the middle of pointing at things on his display on the other. The change caught him by surprise and he jabbed a finger at what turned out to be nothing.

He recovered quickly. Dean would expect no less from his brother. _"So, that went well,"_ Sam deadpanned.

"You have any ideas about what just happened to share with the rest of the class?"

"_They were shooting at something else, not us,"_ Sam confirmed. _"That's one thing, at least. I would hate to think we're on the shoot-on-sight list."_

"Give it time," Dean muttered, only half joking. In the background, _Gabriel_ opined that he, at least, was probably on someone's shoot-on-sight list, and he was willing to bet that the Winchesters were on a few more. Dean ignored him. "I don't know about you, but I really want to know what party we crashed in case it decides to spin up some more dance tunes."

"No one saw them clearly," said Cas to everyone at once.

From that, Dean drew a conclusion. "Shit. We come all the way out here, and what do we find? Shadow again. Shooting at ghosts."

"_There's probably a way to make that work."_

Dean was not discussing the impractical details of ghost hunting with _Gabriel_ right now, and the starship had to know that neither was anyone else, meaning _Gabriel_ was unnerved and chattering to hide it. If it helped, Dean could tune him out all day. "Has anyone thought to, say, apologize for the impromptu firing squad we landed in?" he demanded. "Anyone at all notice that they nearly shot down two ships of the Fleet and their people too?" Somewhere in the back of his mind he noticed the reversed possessive, the opposite of the way he usually thought of things, and forgot about it.

"_Not so far,"_ Sam shrugged. Even from this side of a video link, Dean could see the adrenaline wearing off in his brother's body language. Sam was trying very hard to relax and move on, but the feigned casualness was broken, to Dean's experienced eye, by pupils just a little too large and muscles still tensed to jump and run and fight. _"You want to yell at them?"_ he offered.

Now that Sam mentioned it, he did want to yell at them all. He'd never liked the term friendly fire and he didn't like the experience of it either. And it was probably worse for Cas, he thought, noticing that same tension in the skin and flesh under his hand. The avatars were all but perfect – anything the ship _Castiel_ felt, the human Cas would display, simultaneously. Dean had words for people who took potshots at his family, and more words for people stupid enough to _accidentally_ shoot at them.

"Sure," he said none of that. "Cas, can you put me through to anyone who has their ears on and isn't yelling with their fingers in 'em?"

Cas nodded yes, and moved away without having to be cued, breaking the physical connection between the two of them. He knew Dean didn't like assumptions, even and especially accurate ones, being made about their relationship, and their proximity had been a little too intimate for talking to strangers. It was simply none of their business, and other people could be stupid sometimes.

Taking his signal from the almost imperceptible flick of Cas's eyes that meant _we are in public now_, Dean stared into the viewscreen, which _Castiel_ had reset to a view of the disarrayed mining fleet to give him a sense of his audience, and challenged anyone listening.

"Does someone want to explain what the hell is going on here?" he dared the people aboard those ships. "We came here to make sure no one got hurt while you got your running shoes back on. But if you want to do all the shooting yourselves, we've got other places to be." No matter that he didn't know precisely where those places were; most of his possible destinations at the moment were preceded with a 'not-', as in 'not Shadow and not Earth either, and not here'.

A few seconds went by. "Cas," Dean added very quietly, in a private aside that the ship would hear but which probably wouldn't be broadcast to anyone else, "find me whoever's in charge of this ballsed-up fleet and when he, she, or it calls, put 'em on first and ignore everyone else. But let them listen in."

That cut the number of ruffled people he had to talk to down to one, who materialized onto the screen with a scowl that Dean was willing to bet was permanent.

"_About time you got here," _was his first complaint. _"What did you do, stop off at a beach or two?"_

Not on purpose, as it happened, and Dean heard grouchier comments from Bobby all the time. He wasn't going to be intimidated by this man. In the corner of the screen, the intrusion of scrolling text was _Castiel_ reminding him that this was _Frank Devereaux of the_ Maze Runner, _and that's pronounced Deveroe, Dean_. He knew that.

"So your fleet shooting up the spaceways for fun, or profit?" he volleyed back.

"_We saw something in the distance a few minutes ago,"_ Devereaux told him. _"Might have been a ship. Sure wasn't natural, anyway. Then something exploded against _Adriatica_'s hull. Blew out a chunk of crew quarters, and it was damn lucky there was no one in there at the time, her captain tells me. You can't tell me there was nothing there. I saw it. We all did,"_ he continued a little defensively. _"Can't say what it was, as such, but it was fast. Blasted right through us like the proverbial bat."_

"Who said to start shooting at something you couldn't see right?" Dean wanted to know. Sam would no doubt point out, at some later time, that Dean had maybe done the same thing a number of times. The difference was, Dean would stop shooting if he noticed that some innocent person was in the way. If he couldn't actually see his target…well, maybe.

Devereaux sighed. It was more of a hiss, but it definitely sounded like he was frustrated and stressed out. Who wasn't? Dean utterly failed to sympathize. _"Look,"_ he said shortly, "_it's not that organized. Only a handful of these ships are actually armed. And those that are tend to be the ones hired special for this run. The company ships aren't, and it's them that's run by company people who play well with others and understand words of more than two syllables like 'cooperate', or 'collaborate', or 'coordinate'."_

Dean was well aware that he rubbed people the wrong way sometimes, but Devereaux seemed to be making a point of getting in a few shots at some of the people he was supposed to be leading. This was very much a temporary alliance, he guessed.

"And you all just started shooting at random," he concluded. "Awesome. Well, I can promise you one thing, Captain: if we're going to stick around and guard your backs, that's gotta stop." He tried to think of a way to avoid something he saw in their near future and decided to get it over with as quickly as possible.

"How close are your ships to being flight-worthy again?" Dean checked first.

The captain shrugged. _"Depends on the ship. Depends on the problem, where they've actually been able to figure out what that problem is."_

He didn't hesitate to take the initiative on this and decide their course of action. While the four of them made up a family full of stubborn idjits, as Bobby had labeled them on multiple occasions, at some point there was a tacit acknowledgement that Dean was born to lead and they'd follow his cues if he was put in a position to take that lead. As a result, he was comfortable with making decisions for both pairs with reasonable confidence that they wouldn't argue with him in public. Sure, in private they'd bicker and complain and bargain and compromise and insult each other and just flat-out grouch, but for the moment, Dean was in charge. As long as he didn't exceed what he had the right to decide for them, that is.

"All right. How many armed ships do you have – five?" That was right, so he went on, "I want to talk to their captains or whatever person they want to send over so we don't end up in a circular firing squad with slightly better aim or much worse luck, whichever."

Dean reconsidered, slightly. "They can't come here, though. We'll come to them." _Castiel_ hated having strangers aboard at the best of times; Bobby's maintenance and repair crews back on Launch Station, and some friends, were about the only people he was willing to put up with beyond, of course, the Winchesters. "My brother's flying with the other starship in your sky; we work as a team so he'll come too. You got somewhere we can meet?"

"_Sure,"_ Devereaux agreed, in a tone somewhere between dislike and indifference. _"Why don't you give us an hour or so to get sorted while you…"_ His voice acquired a distinctly sarcastic tone. _"…do whatever it is you do?"_

He managed to avoid gritting his teeth – visibly, at least. Dean knew _that_ tone and didn't like it. "Fine. Just let us know where to transport in and we'll be there in an hour."

The viewscreen snapped off almost before he got the word out, leaving him glaring at the renewed view of the mining fleet, which seemed to be putting itself back together, before Sam's channel came back on.

"_That went better than getting here in the first place, I guess,"_ he offered wryly. _"What do you want me to do in this conference of yours?"_

"Loom over people," Dean snapped in his general direction.

For that, he got a slightly incredulous look while Sam tried to figure out if he was joking or not. Before his brother could come up with a comeback – a process probably not helped by _Gabriel_'s sarcastic laughter – a hand rested in the space between his shoulder blades as Cas came up behind him. The human flinched as those fingers dug into cloth and skin, anchoring him.

"No one is hurt, Dean," Cas reminded him. Ignoring his lover's muttered, "Yeah, Cas, I know," the man who was a ship as well went on, "What do you need from me and _Gabriel_?"

If he was in charge, he might as well act like it, Dean decided. "Take a look at the stalled ships, would you? Humans can work a flightdrive, but your older siblings invented most of that tech. Maybe you'll understand something or spot some glitch the engineers haven't." It was distinctly possible. No one human could understand the maths and mechanics of a flightdrive quite the way a starship could. Part of their minds just worked in a profoundly different way, which was how the flightdrive had been developed in the first place.

"And—" Dean added, but was cut off.

"—watch the skies. Of course, Dean."

Space was big. Really big. But there was always the possibility that even in the vastness, those four mad ships, exiles from the reality-warping Beneath, would find them. Especially since dumb bad luck and the mathematics of probability had nothing to do with revenge and hatred. That'd get them every time, if they let it.

* * *

He felt slightly disoriented the moment he stepped out from _Baby_ into the shuttlebay of the _Maze Runner_, off balance, on edge and slightly lost beyond the fact that he'd never been aboard this ship before. Sizing up the situation and trying to find the half-sensed threat automatically, he thought at first it might be the presence of the _Maze Runner_'s crew, but that couldn't be it. He was used to crowds. Practically impossible to find a human who wasn't, these days.

It took a minute for him to pinpoint the cause, and when he did Dean almost felt like shuddering. No matter how many people there were on board, this was a _dead ship_. It felt different and fundamentally wrong. The _Maze Runner_ couldn't talk and couldn't think, couldn't act on its own. It was a machine.

Dean would never have chosen to label himself as an intuitive person, at least not in those words. But he was good at people, could read intention and emotion off a stranger's face and the way they moved and how they breathed and shifted their weight. He could damn well read Sam's mind at times. He knew when he was being threatened, and he knew when he was being watched. He could tell when he was welcome in a room, when he wasn't, and when no one cared at all.

Some part of him reached out to this starship, and found nothing, liking stepping on a step that wasn't there in the dark. The corner of his mind that had been aware, almost constantly, of the being watching over him devotedly tried to connect to that feeling and was left wanting, grasping at empty air and dead space.

Over time, he'd habituated to the feeling of someone else's presence that always accompanied his everyday life aboard his starship. No matter how much he enjoyed Cas's physical proximity and the familiar experience of knowing that if he turned around he'd see blue eyes trained on him from a breath away, it seemed he'd always been aware of _Castiel_.

Now he had entered an environment where there was nothing. Oh, there were a number of people as he and Sam left _Baby_ in the hands of the bay monitor with a warning (at least on Dean's part) to simultaneously look after her and _don't touch my_ Baby, crewmembers of all ages and sizes hurrying through the corridors the brothers had been directed through on their way to whatever tasks were necessary to keep the ship running.

But the mental space – Dean wouldn't even let himself catch himself using the word _psychic_ – was empty.

_I see you,_ Cas had told him the sentient starships called out to each other on a subconscious level in an all but constant call and response, _here I am. See me?_

Could he have learned that by accident, by the relationship they shared that went so far beyond simple proximity and the teamwork of a common cause? How much of _Castiel_ had Dean integrated into his mind and soul? he wondered.

Sam was looking sideways at him as they walked, in that irritating sidelong glance that meant _I am worried about you and keeping an eye on you because I_ care _but I'm not going to let you see me doing it because I know you'll be pissed that I worry about you._ Or something like that. It was probably just surprise that Dean was being so quiet.

If only to wipe that look off Sam's face, Dean decided to stop freaking out about overreacting to being aboard an unfamiliar craft and focus on getting a handful of probably stubbornly independent captains of armed ships to do what he told them for the immediate future.

He realized, to his annoyance, that he hadn't seen a step of the short walk to the room Captain Devereaux had assembled the others in. That wasn't like him. He'd been so busy being aware of his surroundings on one level that he'd completely missed the probably more relevant one of the way back to the shuttlebay. Dean wasn't sure if he could retrace his steps if he had to, and he tended to always assume that he'd have to make a quick escape at some point. Call it a product of the way he'd grown up; call it the lessons of a career exploring truly alien environments; call it aftershock from recent experiences. He liked to have an out.

Dean remembered that _Castiel_ would transport him away and wherever he wanted to go faster than he could call for the lift through the sensors built into the VR goggles that Sam had fixed sometime during the flight here, and felt better.

Right up until the brothers approached a door on actual hinges, left ajar, that, judging by the cacophony of voices leaking out of it, was their destination. No one inside sounded particularly happy.

"…seen what they _are?_" someone was demanding, at volume.

If anyone answered him, they did so at a slightly quieter level, but by the time the original speaker had reached the end of his response, the Winchesters clearly heard the phrase he ended on, which was "…mavericks, renegades, tricksters, runamoks, and bloody _shipmates!_"

Sam flinched so sharply only the reflexes of a lifetime of proximity kept him from stepping back into his brother. Dean stopped short, carefully put his hands into his pockets where they could safely clench into fists unobserved, and mentally disassembled his favorite handgun, taking it apart in the proper order, setting each piece aside, and arranging them on an imaginary tabletop based on the one back in his rooms aboard _Castiel_ that he had set aside for the care and maintenance of his personal arsenal.

He hated that word. It wasn't so much the word, which had slipped into slang with a different meaning than its original usage, or what it implied, which was true and Dean would not change the truth of it for anything – it was the tone of voice the unseen man had said it in, the attitude that tone not only implied but telegraphed in bright flashing colors, and that Dean didn't like labels he hadn't chosen to attach to himself.

And now he was angry again. Since he and Sam were standing in a corridor and were going to have to talk to people in the immediate future, he mentally put the gun back together. Cleaning, maintaining, and repairing the various weapons he owned was its own form of meditation for Dean, and if they'd had all the time in all the worlds he would have mentally cleaned and polished each piece for however long it took him to calm down.

Still, even running through the process in his imagination helped to focus him back on what they were here for, and that did not include taking a swing at the shouting man. Actually, part of Dean noticed, he wasn't so much shouting as explaining loudly in a terrifyingly reasonable tone of voice, as if he was convinced of the innate rightness of his statement and simply believed that if he spoke louder than everyone else then they would listen and be convinced.

That was not a good sign. Dean was, in all probability, not going to like this man.

Within a few minutes, he knew he was right. The person who'd spat out the word _shipmates_ like it was a synonym for _mass-murdering psychopath_ was Gordon Walker, commander of the _Silver Nemesis_, which was – although this word had never been used, Dean rather got the idea – a mercenary ship. They'd been acting as protection for various groups and individual ships since long before the dark Fleet had turned dangerous and disappeared into the black somewhere. Apparently there was a world beyond the Fleet, as Walker had reminded the brothers in an irritatingly patient and reasonable tone of voice that didn't manage to hide the general manner of _I think you are dumbasses_. Humans had been preying on their own for a lot longer than the starships had, and there were a certain number of hijackers and honest-to-goodness pirate ships in the big 'out there'.

That Dean had automatically jumped to images of old movies and ancient adventure stories at the term _pirate ship_ had probably not helped. He'd liked those movies and stories, and while he knew that in the real world it was no laughing matter the phrase had brought associations with it.

They weren't going to get on in the slightest.

That was the worst of it, they ultimately decided, once the arguments had been argued and the shouting was over. Still, someone had to take over the ill-assorted people who captained armed ships, because if they were left alone to shoot at anything they felt like shooting someone was going to get hurt.

"Our sensors picked up on a ship in the distance," one of the men justified the recent free-for-all, "like it was following us or something. Then it disappeared again, so of course we got ready for a fight."

Dean had refrained from shouting. "Yes, of course you did," he said, ominously. "That was us. My _Castiel_ and I dropped back into this universe from flight to look for you. You'd moved from the rendezvous point. We had to find you somehow. Are you telling me you're the one who shot at him?"

Martin something or other had visibly weighed up the advantages of a negative answer versus what the sensor records would show. "Possibly. There was a lot going on."

"Okay," Dean said to that, "Two things. One, you take any more shots at either of us and you and I are going to have it out one-on-one." He outmassed Martin whoever significantly and he was in a lot better shape, too. The man wisely chose not to respond to that. "Two, are you telling me there's no plan whatsoever? That the people with guns shoot them and everyone else…does what, exactly?"

"We're not supposed to be stalled in the middle of nowhere," someone else pointed out, a bit maliciously. "We'd have been all but there by now if _some_ people could be bothered to buy decent parts for their engines and get them maintained on a regular basis."

She must have been on a ship that was still flight-capable. As expected, that went over well.

"Hey! This isn't our fault!" from Martin, looking to regain some ground after backing down from Dean.

"Oh yeah, like that rust bucket of yours is fit to fly!" from a strongly accented Benny…something. Dean was catching about half of the names. From experience, he knew Sam would remember the others, and even if they missed any, the ships would know.

"Are you suggesting I don't take care of my ship?" from a Captain Pond, who sounded genuinely taken aback.

"Where do you get off making accusations like that?" Walker was maintaining that calm but still threatening demeanor, regardless of who he was talking to. It may have been his default state.

Under the noise, Sam complained to his brother, "I vote we let them eat each other, how about it?"

Dean was in favor of that.

"What is wrong with the ships, does anyone know?" he interrupted the argument instead.

He got mostly complaints, although slightly more productive ones. "It seems to be different things for each ship," a more amiable Captain Pond told him. "We've got one where the block of computer programming controlling the entry to flight – and there's a lot of it, on one of our sort of ships, which I realize you don't have to deal with," she said generously, which was nicer by far than the way other people in the room would have phrased it. "– has just fallen apart at the seams. It'll take weeks to debug. The right computer program could do it a little faster, but that's not running on all thrusters either. The _Lizbet_ had a critical connection go dead. Her crew tracked it down yesterday, but they can't explain how it was eaten through by leakage from a brand new pipe carrying a corrosive material that they're going to do something clever with when we finally get to Rogue."

She took a breath. "I took a look at that. The piping shouldn't have given out for another five years yet, if they really got the materials new when they said they did. My _Kitsune_ has a gremlin somewhere in the electrical transformers. If we could corner it, we could get rid of it, but we can't corner it. And if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs," she added wryly. When everyone looked at her oddly, she protested, "What? I haven't eaten since…the last time I ate, I suppose."

Walker rolled his eyes when he thought no one was looking. Sam had been looking and glared at him.

"Basically, if it can go wrong, it has gone wrong somewhere," she concluded, as they didn't need a play-by-play of everything in detail, just the general idea. It wasn't the brothers' responsibility to fix any ships beyond their own. "Just, all at the same time, more or less, and scattered across different craft. About the only thing that hasn't happened is a complete breach."

"Now you've done it," complained Martin. Everyone appeared to ignore him – but at least one person, the woman who had implied that the failures were down to poor maintenance whose name neither brother had caught but which might have started with Ruby, looked like she might want some wood to knock on. Her ship was one of the ones still flight-capable.

"And there's nothing in common?" Dean wanted to know. "Parts? Sources? People? Anyone been near these engines that shouldn't be? Anyone got something to gain by this delay?"

"Of course not," probably-Ruby huffed. "We're all wasting time out here. We've got expectations to meet, you know."

"My crew's the best there is," Walker said flatly. "But I let those idiots with Roman on board back in port. They may have broken something through sheer incompetence."

"The only thing in common is the effect of the problems," Pond admitted. "At least, that I've seen so far. And that all the ships affected are in this party. I don't know – I haven't heard – if this has happened to anyone else out there."

No one had anything more helpful than that.

"We might be able to help with debugging that programming block," Sam offered. "I can try talking my _Gabriel_ into taking a crack at it. If I manage to sell it to him as a puzzle, he might go for it."

"We'll figure that out later," Dean reminded him, "but right now I want to make sure we don't get a repeat of the Wild West reenactment. Now, does anyone have any good ideas, or am I going to call the shots here?"

They spent the next hour arguing in circles, by the end of which Dean wanted to shoot them all and call it a day. He also resolved to never, ever, call a similar meeting of all the captains in this fleet. Five of them were bad enough; fifteen would drive him to break something and use the sharp edges to hack his way out of the room through the nearest wall, whether or not it had a door in it. Or rip someone's arm off and beat them to death with the bloody end.

He was beginning to get why _Gabriel_ liked messing with strangers so much. Every so often, they deserved it.

If Sam really did get _Gabriel_ to help out with that computer program, maybe Dean could talk him into inserting random lines of code that did strange things every time they ran it. He was willing to bet _Gabriel_ would get interested in that a lot faster, and made a mental note to pitch the idea at Sam first, since Sam sort of had already promised his starship's help and the kid, he thought unabashedly of a grown man four inches taller than him, hated to let people down.

Finally, he decided they weren't getting anything done and he'd lost track of what ships were which and who was commanding them anyway.

"Enough!" he snapped, getting to his feet from where he'd been slumped over his folded arms at the table that dominated the room, smacking his hands down on the table, and leaning on them aggressively. "So, basically, no one has any good ideas, and I'm going to call the shots. Here's the deal. You've got the guns, but no idea what to do with them. Well, holster them. From here on out, _no one_ gets into a firefight unless _Castiel_ or _Gabriel_, or both of them, shoot first. Do not ever, ever shoot at either of them again. I'm really upset about that, in case you hadn't noticed. And maybe you don't know this…" Walker's pronunciation of _shipmates_ nagged at him and he mentally stomped on it. "…but I don't care what they look like from here, they are people, and they are our family. When Sam and me get upset about things, they get upset too, and then they try to make us feel better by solving whatever it is that's bugging us. Now, they won't hurt you, because they're _decent_ people –" …_most of the time_, he didn't say out loud, because _Gabriel_ was basically an ass quite often, and _Castiel_ could be damn scary when he was angry… "– but you might lose those weapons you pointed at them."

At some point he'd lost the plot of this. What had been the point he was trying to get to? Oh yes.

"And if that happens, something comes calling, then the fight is probably going to move into flight space, so if you're running right by then, don't follow them. Stay with this fleet just in case whatever it is gets away from us and doubles back. But _look_ before you shoot. And even then, that's not bloody likely. If it's one of those pirates you and yours –" this to Walker "– deal with, then it's not going to be able to outfly us. You've never seen my Cas fly," he added with a bit of affectionate pride before becoming serious again. "If it's one of the dark Fleet, then they're our problem and they'll be coming after us rather than you. They really hate us. Any questions?"

Martin opened his mouth to say something. Sam smiled at him disconcertingly.

"If it helps," he said, "that question was rhetorical."

Martin thought better of whatever had been on his mind and closed his mouth again.

"Good meeting," Dean said cheerfully. "Go fix things."

In the silence, he thought he heard someone, probably Devereaux, who'd mostly stayed out of the arguing by virtue of not being there for most of it, snicker.

* * *

"You are the worst meeting leader ever," Sam laughed as they took off from the shuttlebay, heading back home.

His brother could not disagree. "Yeah, but I'm the best meeting _ender_ ever."

"You have your moments."

"_I think so too,"_ _Baby_'s intercom said. _"I'm glad we're family, Dean."_

Dean jumped. Dammit. He thought he'd become immune to _Castiel_'s favorite game. This was a new twist. Just how bored had _Castiel_ been up above Shadow? At least the Winchesters had had a killer to hunt. "Cas! Were you listening in on all that?" he asked.

"_It was boring."_ This from _Gabriel_. _"Sammy, what if I don't _want_ to read all their code?"_

"You know I can't make you do anything you don't want to, _Gabriel_," Sam replied serenely. "Including not calling me that."

"…_I'm suspicious."_

"Maybe we can come to some arrangement."

"_Hmmm…"_ _Gabriel_ said contemplatively, a sound which Dean privately thought should have struck terror into the hearts of everyone within a light-year's radius but apparently wasn't having that effect on Sam, who had an odd expression on his face halfway between anticipation and puzzlement. Dean would figure that one out later.

"Did any of you notice how much they didn't want to talk about the possibility of sabotage?" he asked, steering _Baby_ clear of a blocky ship that wasn't even pretending to have any acquaintance with the idea of aerodynamics. It was basically a brick, he thought uncharitably. Several bricks, smashed together by some particularly incompetent brick maker…whatever it was you called a brick maker.

"Now that you mention it, they did dismiss it pretty much out of hand," Sam agreed. "But it just seems too random. I would take out the armed ships, but only three out of five are down. I'd take out the big processor ship, so even if they decided to leave the broken ones behind they couldn't do much once they got there, but that one's just fine. It doesn't make any sense."

"Access," Dean simply said. He didn't need to elaborate, as everyone involved in the conversation knew him well enough to figure it out from there.

"_They're not all from the same port,"_ _Castiel_ told him.

"Yeah, but they rotate personnel around, right? Even the Fleet, our Fleet, does that from time to time."

"I still wonder why they didn't want to talk about it." Sam sighed. "Maybe they're tired of talking about it. I'm tired of talking about it already. If I ask for no more meetings, will that instantly cause meetings?"

"Probably," said both ships and Dean more or less simultaneously, which at least made Sam laugh.

"Then I won't." He got up from his copilot's chair and stretched as best as possible considering the shuttlecraft's ceiling wasn't quite high enough for him to stand upright properly. "You ready to deal, _Gabriel_?"

"_Yeah, I got some demands,"_ the ship responded, characteristically cheeky. _"Let's talk about it, shall we?"_

Once the trickster starship had transported Sam away, Dean concentrated on his piloting for a few more seconds. He wanted to be sure that _Gabriel_ had dropped out of the conversation and Dean was going to give his brother time to put whatever distraction or diversion he had in mind into play.

"Cas?" he said finally.

"_I'm here, Dean."_ As if he was expecting any other answer.

"You know you're family."

"_Yes, Dean."_

"You know nothing changes that?"

"_I know."_

"You know just 'cause I don't like that word it doesn't mean I want to be anything else, right?"

"_It's just a word, Dean."_

"I know that." He set _Baby_ into her final approach vector to his starship, shining silver even in the deep black light-years away from any star. "When I punch someone out about it, probably sometime soon, it's because of the tone, not because he's saying something not true, yeah?"

"_It doesn't matter to me what anyone else thinks,"_ _Castiel_ told him, in the flat monotone that ironically meant he cared about what he was saying very much. _"You shouldn't either. I love you. Sam loves you. So does Gabriel, although he will never admit it. Your friends all love you."_

That was more than Dean could handle in one conversation. "Cas, you're embarrassing me."

"_Oh. I'm sorry. …Why? No one is listening."_

He didn't have a good answer for that. He suspected it was a strange human thing that he'd never be able to explain to Cas.

"_And I'd still rather be out here than back at Shadow,"_ the starship added as Dean touched _Baby_ down and the bay doors rolled closed at the edge of the human's vision. _"And I'm glad you're home."_

Well, when he put it like _that_…

"Significantly less blood, too, unless Sam gives me my favorite handgun back and I pack it over there."

The shuttlebay must have repressurized, because Cas opened _Baby_'s hatch from the outside. "Don't do that," he said. "I thought we were trying to stop humans dying."

"And we did," Dean reminded him, as they left the shuttlebay together. Deciding deliberately to put the tone he'd been avoiding for years now out of his mind, he twined his fingers in between Cas's and decided that no mercenary captain with a bad attitude was going to make him feel guilty about it. "They kept us there long past our usefulness, but I guess we did good there, in the end…"

* * *

_to be continued_

**Quick Author's Note:** I wrote significant parts of this chapter doped up on chocolate and Midol and with a kitten on my lap. Ironically, by the time I was writing true fluff, the kitten, which really lives with my neighbors but visits, had gone home. (…) _In the real world_, someone important to me asked during _Strange New Worlds_ what was going on with Shadow…so…yeah. People who talk to me get hints and the chance to ask for things they want to see!


	4. Torn and Frayed

**Chapter Four: Torn and Frayed**

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_Then: Shadow_

The problem with these scanners, Sam decided, was that they couldn't come up with anything new. If the system recognized something, it could tell you what it was like a shot, and twice as accurate given the average ability of the handful of members of the Shadow survey team that had lined up at an impromptu and somewhat ramshackle shooting range to practice with an equally mismatched assemblage of projectile weapons that ran the gamut from the highest-caliber rifle Dean could dig out of his personal arsenal to the much more modern focused energy hand weapons that had been sent along with the survey team in the first place. And yes, Meg's crossbow of death had made an appearance and getting his hands on it had raised Dean's spirits almost as much as the trip he'd made up to orbit to pick up that rifle. If there was a significant delay between him leaving to get it and returning with not only the rifle but his duct-taped-up hand-me-down bag full of ammunition into the bargain…well, no one batted an eye or asked him to account for his movements or activities during the interim.

The simile failed under a certain pressure, Sam had to admit. No matter how many times he'd waved the handheld scanner around the area where Max had been killed early yesterday morning and changed the settings on it, it had thrown up the same number of known quantities and a baffling quantity of unknowns. It could tell him the polysyllabic chemical composition of the objects he was pointing it at, but it couldn't give them names that meant anything to him. He'd made the readings available to anyone else interested in helping him out, but because the surveyors knew so comparatively little about the planet to begin with, they didn't have names for much of it yet.

About the only thing he'd been able to figure out was that Max had definitely been here and he was definitely dead and it was not an accident. Sam still thought there was an intelligent agency behind it, despite the savagely slashed nature of the wounds and the claw fragments Dr. Mosley had found in the body.

Also, if there'd been another human up on that bluff before Sam had gone to investigate the space at the edge, the scanner would have picked up the traces he or she would have left. Maybe human senses could no longer detect the spoor that human bodies left everywhere they went, scent and sweat and skin cells leaving a trail constantly, but the scanner could. And the scanner didn't find anything like that.

Sam knew this scanner hadn't been tampered with – at least, not to hide evidence. _Gabriel_ had sent it to him; who knew what the starship had done to it? But it was working. Trickster he might be, but one of the conditions of the arrangement between him and Sam was that he didn't get in the way of things Sam genuinely needed to do and the human played along with just about everything else. Also, while he probably wouldn't admit it, _Gabriel_ preferred it when Sam wasn't overly angry at him. They were walking too tentative a line at the moment.

There was also a strange electrostatic charge hanging around the area that, when Sam had run his hands through his long hair in exasperation at readings that didn't make any sense, had made his hair stand on end more than it should have, individual hairs sticking to those fingers in a fuzzy cloud for a few extra moments. He didn't know where it had come from, or how, if anything, it might matter.

"We were right nearby," he told Dean later. Everyone had been called back to base camp for safety until they figured out if they'd stumbled across a predator or had someone lose his or her cool in a serious way, and the brothers were comparing notes over lunch with each other and the starships listening in through the communicators in the VR goggles. "You'd think we'd have seen a lightning strike. That's not the only thing that could cause it, but that's my first idea."

"_No storms,"_ _Castiel_ reported to both of them. _"No lightning anomalies."_

"You sound awfully sure of that, for someone who says he wasn't watching that spot at the time," Dean pushed.

"_I wasn't. _Gabriel_ and I were paying attention to you and Sam."_ The brothers had in fact been maintaining this pattern of trying to keep their starship companions in the loop even though half of their team was down on the planet and the other half hadn't been properly invited down yet. Rufus had been reluctant to accept the humans to begin with. While they were trying to sell him the idea of the starships' human avatars as extra pairs of hands and two of the brightest minds around, he remained skeptical.

The Fleet people who worked directly with the starships tended to think of themselves as special, and the relationships, in whatever form, they maintained with those ship minds as unique. The elements of the Fleet that didn't have that one-on-one relationship, then, often thought of handling the starships as something only a few people could do, in part because the ships' partners guarded that relationship jealously. It was only a small step from that to assuming that the starships couldn't work with most people or adapt to new tasks and there was no point in trying.

It was an incorrect assumption in almost every way – the starships were very long-lived, so they would by necessity have to work with more than one person over the course of their lifetimes, especially as they were usually incredibly social and thrived on maintaining established connections and making new ones. Even the ones who weren't necessarily good with strangers were usually just fine with people once they'd been introduced properly and the ship and the human had a sense of each other. Still, just like any human, they could take a dislike to someone as readily as the next person. And they were infinitely adaptable, their quicksilver minds embracing new challenges to keep them busy and entertained.

But it was sometimes very hard to convince some people of that.

It was quite possible, Dean had been speculating a couple of days ago, that Rufus had been told to keep them separated, hostage to each other's good behavior. Under better conditions, Sam would have thought that was a little paranoid, but he was still stinging from the way he felt the humans and ships of the Fleet both had been treating him after they'd gotten back from the Beneath. He already felt like he'd been tainted by what had happened. He didn't need their help.

The night Max had died, Sam knew that _Gabriel_ had been, to some degree, down on the surface with him, listening to the ghost stories and providing a whispered running commentary from very close range. They'd been back away from the main body of the group, close enough to hear and keep an eye on as many people as possible while simultaneously not being seen. The human avatars took up more of the ships' attention than directing a holographic substitute – "More bits," _Gabriel_ had told him cheerfully, while his human partner-slash-favorite-target had been trying to take a perfectly reasonable drink of the beer someone had brought along – and Sam had almost gotten used to the physical contact _Gabriel_ was warming to.

After that, Sam had volunteered to keep the first watch to hide the fact that Dean had disappeared somewhere else with Cas and he didn't want anyone wondering about that or, storm lords forbid, going looking for them.

"_But a bright flash like a lightning discharge would have shown up as a possible threat,"_ _Castiel_ was still saying. _"We would have noticed that."_

"Maybe there's something around here that uses electricity as a weapon," Dean guessed at him. "Like those fish on Nexus. Remember those?"

"I do remember those," Sam told him. "They're the reason you're not allowed to play with electricity anymore without someone watching over your shoulder."

His brother glared at him. "I didn't know they could zap people. If I had, I wouldn't have grabbed it with my bare hands."

"One of these days, you'll think better of going fishing on planets you don't know anything about."

"I like fishing!"

"_The contemplation,"_ _Gabriel_, who never missed an opportunity to poke fun at Dean, chimed in, _"the peace, the quiet, the fish guts, the things with tentacles, the other things with big teeth, the fair weather, the salts of various exotic kinds, the –"_

"Both of you shut up! That wasn't the point!"

"_You're the one who brought up Nexus."_

"I was providing a perfectly reasonable example. And I wasn't talking to you."

Sam decided the conversation could do with getting back on track. For one thing, they were getting strange sideways looks from some of the other people in the grounded barge's mess hall. Appearing to argue with the empty air could cause that, it seemed. "Any luck with the target practice? I left halfway through."

"Yeah, they're not bad," Dean shrugged. "I mean, they're not us, but they know which end of an energy weapon not to point at their face first thing, which is more than I can say for some people. Can't say all of them are going to like going around armed until we find out what it is thinks humans make good chew toys and if it has a preferred territory, hopefully with obvious 'do not cross' signs. But they're not going to hurt themselves."

_"Some people have before, though, here on Shadow,"_ _Castiel_ told them all. _"We checked. You were right, Sam, Max isn't the first human to die here."_

The brothers glanced around, sizing up the room automatically. "Cas, is this going to be trouble? Should we be talking about this in public?"

_"I don't think it's anyone's fault,"_ the starship replied.

"Okay then. Let's hear it. Causes of death?"

_"Four deaths: a heart attack possibly caused by infection by a native bacterium that got into the water after a failure of a filtering and purifying device, suffocation due to an allergy to the seed of the dominant form of grass, an apparent suicide the file of which I can't immediately get into without setting off alarms, and a drowning as a result of an underwater cave-in. In the past five months, since this project started, there have also been thirty-four people transferred off world after developing the same allergy. They have not yet developed a test for it, and since it seems to strike team members unexpectedly, some humans may be more at risk than others."_

Dean whistled, low and skeptical. "So, basically, they've been going through people like _Gabriel_ with a bag of lollipops."

_"You still owe me one of those."_

"Lose a bet?" Dean asked his brother.

"Yeah, like a year ago! And you cheated, _Gabriel_, you know full well you did. He's perfectly capable of replicating his own candy," Sam added as an aside, "he just likes bringing it up to pester me about."

* * *

They headed for the hills, but at least it was by invitation.

Refusing all offers of company, the Winchesters set out alone to track down whatever native creature had gone after Max so effectively, hopefully before it taught all its friends and family that humans tasted good and didn't always have big claws. Most of the Shadow survey team had been content to trust them to take care of the problem, although they'd been offered the pick of the base's weaponry and equipment.

By and large, they'd stuck with what they knew.

And they were never completely alone, anyway. It had already been well proven that nothing, including physical violence, could keep _Gabriel_ and _Castiel_ from watching their backs, even if it was from orbit.

"Because you don't move quietly enough, _Gabriel_, that's why," Sam was still arguing as Dean piloted one of the survey team's smaller land skimmers outward, not so much retracing their route of a few days earlier as cutting a line straight from point A to point B at a speed that didn't make the small craft rattle too much. Dean had not particularly wanted to drive it, but between the third degree their family had gotten from Fleet Command and this assignment to Shadow he still hadn't yet had the time or materials to rebuild _Baby_ from the damage she'd incurred in the Beneath. That was nagging at him. No one objected to him thinking of the little shuttlecraft as part of their family too, and having her in shreds made him feel like he'd been neglecting her.

_"Are you suggesting I can't be sneaky when I want to?"_ _Gabriel_ protested, campaigning to join them in person, so to speak, on their hunting expedition.

"Sneaky? Yes. Subtle? No. No one could ever accuse you of subtlety. But before a few months ago, I could count on one hand the number of times you bothered to be any more substantial than a hologram."

_"Am so substantial,"_ the starship interrupted inconsequentially. _"More so than he is."_

This could only refer to _Castiel_, who was physically smaller as a starship, but it was so completely not relevant to Sam's point that he decided to act as if the comment hadn't happened. "I don't have time to train you to move quietly across a forest floor with big predators somewhere around. Not now, anyway." This argument had been going on essentially since they started gearing up, and while Sam had a very good point, _Gabriel_ evidently planned to persist until someone shouted at him.

Dean would volunteer – as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed. While _Castiel_ had similarly wanted to accompany them, and he was significantly more used to being human than his older brother, he'd admitted that if _he_ got to hunt with them, _Gabriel_ would take matters into his own hands and join them on the surface regardless of whether he'd be a help or a hindrance, invited or not. And hindrance he would be.

It gave Dean some reassurance to know that they were in very little danger. True, they were tracking something they still hadn't identified and weren't quite sure how to kill, but the brothers had more than a bit of experience at that. They'd never yet encountered something they couldn't kill, if they tried.

Between the hand scanners set to alert them the minute the devices got even a trace of the biochemical signature from the place where Max had died, and the arsenal stowed away in their bags and in their clothes for easy access at very short notice, and the smartsuits set to act as armor in the case of an attack, and the starships watching them from orbit, the predator and all its cousins didn't stand much of a chance. The brothers just needed to track it down, bring it down, and then transport it back to the base so that the xenobiologists could figure out what might repel it in future. And before it got the chance to get a taste for humans. At least, this was the argument offered.

Sam had refrained from pointing out that Max's body hadn't been eaten into at all. Unusual, for something with claws that big. Claws like that usually implied predator, suggested carnivore. But the body had been left alone after death and then tossed off a cliff. It was odd. He certainly didn't intend to let his guard down, if _Gabriel_ would ever let him get five seconds of quiet.

"_Gabriel_, I said no! I said no the first time, and I meant no the next eleven times. What part of no did you not understand?"

For that he got a shocked silence from the other end of the communication channel, which abruptly closed itself off without warning or further protestation.

He had just enough time to start feeling guilty for snapping – which, he realized later, had probably been deliberate – before the more private link in his VR goggles switched itself on and after a few seconds, _Gabriel_ broke the transferred silence with a wounded, _"Don't be mad at me, Sammy. I don't want you hurt."_

Ah, shit. Now he felt really bad. Back in the lightless hell of the Beneath, _Gabriel_ had been promised that he would have to watch Sam die, one way or another. He'd lived with that promise and only with the destruction of _Samael_, who had done his very best to tear apart _Gabriel_'s whole world, had the starship been able to move past that. Even knowing his tormentor was gone forever, and having almost killed himself in the doing of that, _Gabriel_ had still reflexively chained himself to the human's side. Whatever they were going to become to each other, in the aftermath of that, neither of them knew. If _Gabriel_ was overreacting, he was doing so with the best of intentions.

"I know that, _Gabriel_. I need you watching over me up there, not playing around in the mud down here, all right?"

"_Fine."_ He was still sulking. Sam could imagine it, distinguishing the ship's _upset_ from his _irritated _even from here.

"And you don't like mud. Or bugs. Or guns, close up."

_Gabriel_ was forced to agree with this on the basis of significant precedent.

The brothers were used to moving on foot with only the supplies they could carry, so they abandoned the skimmer at the other night's campsite. Dean dropped it in the exact spot, near enough considering the difference in the crafts' sizes, where the larger vehicle had been the night the exploratory party had camped there. with no rain since or any determined effort to clear away their traces, the evidence of their stop was still there in the fire pit, long since out, the broken branches and disturbed undergrowth not yet settled back into its accustomed configuration, and – a quick sniff of the air suggested – latrines not filled in. Clumsy work. They all knew better, had been trained better, but they hadn't left the area under ideal circumstances.

"Start from the bluff?" Dean asked peremptorily despite where he'd parked the skimmer.

"No, I wanted to lead off from here on purpose. Think we can track Max from here? If he took a detour into some creature's den and it followed him from there, we might learn something from that."

His brother was fine with that plan. "Right. You run the scanner. I'd rather trust my own senses, especially on this planet."

"Right," Sam said conversationally as they scouted the area, "Shadow's infamous shadows." The ones that couldn't be caught on video and didn't appear on any sensor that ran on electricity. Yes, Sam knew the human brain ran on electricity too; just why the human visual cortex was apparently immune remained a mystery, just like everything else about the shadows. He hadn't seen one on either stopover on Shadow, so far, so he considered himself still skeptical – but neutral – about the whole matter.

"I'm tellin' you, they're out there, man."

The Winchesters picked up Max's trail after a few minutes, after a number of other discoveries that would be either grounds for Rufus to chew the entire party out for a week, or excellent future blackmail material. The brothers had grown up moving from place to place and learning to hide their trail, never mind if that meant physically or electronically. From the clutter around the campsite, no one else currently on Shadow had the same experience.

Sam's scanner blipped the noise that meant _human_ rather than the more urgent alert of _match with hostile found_. Following the trail, the brothers headed out across Shadow's surface.

* * *

_Now: The Middle of Nowhere, Roman Enterprises' Mining Fleet_

"You are filthy," said Cas disapprovingly, stepping backwards a pace or two from the spot where he'd transported Dean back aboard after over half a day's work on a neighboring barge.

It was an understatement. The human was covered in chemicals he didn't know the names of and didn't much like the smell or feel of, either. He'd been assured they were nontoxic to humans unless he did something like swallow a gallon of them, but he'd become increasingly convinced they were soaking in through his skin to rot his body away from the inside. There were metal filings under his stubby, working-man's nails and in his hair, and possibly in the back of his teeth as well. Then again, that could have been an illusion, albeit a confusing one, created from the smell and taste of the welding and metal-cutting equipment that had come into play at some point. Far less sophisticated than the laser cutters the Fleet used in various sizes, the equipment that the _Prometheus_'s crew had dragged out of its storage bay was almost primitive enough to have a rotating serrated blade. Almost, but not quite, to Dean's relief.

He didn't even want to think about what his clothes looked like. It was bad enough knowing what they felt like.

In his eagerness to get off the newly up and running _Prometheus_ and home, he'd forgotten to warn _Castiel_ what a mess he was, Dean realized a second too late. Cas had come to greet him as they were both accustomed to, but the starship, whatever form he happened to be using, had long since expressed his dislike for mud and variations thereupon, at least on him. Most ships, living in the naturally sterile depths of space as they did, abhorred the idea of being physically dirty. Cas had more of a tolerance than most, with the possible exception of the research ship _Joshua_, because he spent so much time being human in the company of a physically active and restless human being, but he had his limits. Dean's current state was apparently one of them.

"True," Dean agreed, on the evidence of the mess all over him. "But the _Prometheus_ is working again. Had to pretty much take the engine apart and put it back together again before it could get past the knot its computer had tied itself in, but it'll fly. That's all but the _Kitsune_ ready to go, unless Sam has checked in with other news. And this stuff will come off, Cas. Probably. Well, most of it, anyway."

Cas took another pointed step backwards, leaving the corridor free in obvious invitation. Long since ready to get the probably not corrosive chemicals off his skin, Dean headed off to the shower in his quarters to get a little cleaner, Cas trailing behind him at a safe distance.

"I left _Baby_ over there," he said from behind a layer of fabric as he pulled the ruined shirt over his head while trying to keep from touching it as much as possible. "Wanted to take the quick way back 'cause I was well ready to be off and home. Bring her home for me?"

_Castiel_ could fly the shuttlecraft by remote as readily as Dean could by hand. Their piloting styles were different, as Dean loved to fly _Baby_ and _Castiel_ generally just wanted to get it from wherever Dean had left the shuttle to wherever it needed to go. (An experiment in Cas piloting the shuttlecraft by hand hadn't gone well; it had proved too disorienting for _Castiel_ to be in two almost-the-same but parallel locations as the ship and the human avatar paced each other at little more than a coasting pace.)

"I'll talk to the _Prometheus_'s shuttlebay manager," Cas agreed, unfazed – why would he be? – by his companion stripping down in front of him as they talked. "_Gabriel _has warned me that these humans don't like it when we control their ships ourselves."

Dean could only imagine how _Gabriel_ had found that out. "It's a little freaky if you're not used to it, Cas. And you should probably give people fair warning before you open shuttlebay doors on them. We humans gotta breathe, you know."

"I know that, Dean," Cas replied calmly, keeping his seat on the edge of the bed as Dean started in on his shower. The human was used to being dirty, sweaty, bruised, and bleeding – he ran around alien planets all but on his own for a living – but there was something inexpressibly filthy, in a Cas's aptly chosen word, about mucking around in the guts and bowels of a starship that couldn't fix itself to any significant degree.

"You can come in here, you know. I mean, you can hear me wherever I am, and you can talk to me through the intercom as easily as being human, I guess, but you don't have to wait for me out there." He paused as water ran. "I kind of sent you away earlier, didn't I?"

"You were in no danger," Cas reiterated, a shade sullenly, from this morning. He hadn't wanted to leave Dean alone among essential strangers, and had persisted in trying to talk to the human through Dean's repaired VR goggles until Dean had told the starship that he was trying to work, so let him work.

"Yeah, yeah, it's just that I was getting those looks, and there's only so many of those I can take without wanting to rearrange some faces, you know? Actually, strike that, you probably don't."

Silence, except for the water. Then Cas disagreed, quietly but from close enough – Dean could see his silhouette – that he was still clearly audible. "Yes, I do. You should not have gone."

"I promised I would, Cas. We're still trying to earn our way back into the Fleet's good graces, at least that's what Sammy keeps telling me, and Ellen sent us out here. She must have had a reason, she's cool like that. And I'm not hurt, no one was going to do anything but make nasty remarks, at worst. Their captain's all right. Decent guy, straight with me. I don't care what the rest of 'em think of me, remember? We talked about this."

"Why would they do that?" Cas wondered a bit plaintively. The reception the Winchesters _et al_ had gotten from the fleet they'd been sent to protect had not been universally welcoming. At least on Shadow they'd been accepted; they'd been outsiders who had wanted to leave, but no one had seen fit to insult them at every other turn.

Dean thought about the way the people aboard the mining ships he'd volunteered his help on had acted around him. There was clearly some sort of history on him and his family going around, and he was going to track it down and set it on fire, possibly along with whoever was holding it at the time. Even if it contained only the bare-bones basics and was scrupulously researched and fact-checked, which was unlikely, rumor and gossip and human tendencies to exaggeration and pessimism both would probably turn it into a proper horror story. Dean could only imagine what even an official Fleet profile said about the four of them. They'd been recruited to be self-sufficient, independent, innovative, and stubborn as all hells, but between longtime troublemaker _Gabriel_, Dean, Sam, and _Castiel_, who _Michael_ in particular was currently quite unhappy with, they'd made a reputation for themselves, and the best thing that could probably be said about their collective reputation was "colorful".

He'd heard part of it already, from Gordon Walker, whose bite of "mavericks, renegades, tricksters, runamoks, and bloody _shipmates!"_ was still something he'd be angry about for some time. Maybe every word of that was true, and maybe because of it they weren't fit to mix with the rest of what these people thought of as decent society. In that case, society could take its decency and shove it somewhere tender.

"I could deal just fine," he thought aloud to his ship partner, "if it was consistent. If they all thought one thing of me and I knew how to face that. But it's like half of them caught the news about what happened to us all in the Beneath and think I'm some kind of hero just because we survived the first firing line in a war that hasn't happened yet. But then half of them think I'm a useless pretty boy because the ship I fly with doesn't need everything done for him like their boat over there, like I'm some kind of teddy bear and nothing else. That's how I got so messy, if you're interested. Between me determined to prove them wrong and them giving me the scut work to watch me fail, I think they sent me into every sloppy hideaway and backwash aboard." Who was he kidding? _Castiel_ was pretty much always interested. He wondered, in passing, how long it would take Cas to find out what a teddy bear was.

"I know what a teddy bear is, Dean." Ah. Not very long at all. Once again, he began to wonder if _Castiel_ actually could read his mind. The ship had denied it in the past.

"And then half of them picked up gossip that you and me are what we are and they expect me to start –" Angry about that in particular, he said something so foul that a scandalized Cas said "_Dean!_" in a tone of absolute shock.

"You get the idea. And don't tell me that's three halves."

"I wasn't going to."

That was progress in itself, that the ship had given up correcting the exaggerations and fits of illogic with which Dean often filled his thoughts.

"Not to mention the _other_ half after that who have the complete wrong idea about you. You know there are people out there who don't believe you and your siblings are really sentient? Really people? That they think you're just pretty tricky robots, faking it really good?"

"Yes, Dean. I knew."

Dean was scrubbing at his nails as he spoke, trying to get those metal filings out from where they'd stuck between nail and skin in a sludge that he'd acquired as he tried to pry something or other out of its mooring, but stopped abruptly as the implications got to him. Most of the time he could clean up and talk at the same time, but some things deserved his full attention. It wasn't like the shower water was being wasted. It'd be processed and purified and broken down and recycled without the starship having to take on fresh supplies.

"Cas? You telling me that there are people who act like that straight to you?" Could the rest of the human race really have so little _clue?_ Or had Dean just lost all perspective? What would he think of such creatures, if he hadn't spent the last five years of his life with them?

The starship in question assured him, "Not many, and when we can go back to…breaking trail?" he tried, tentatively. Dean had used the phrase a couple of times to describe their default mission of scoping out new planetary systems, but he'd never heard it in Cas's voice before.

"Right." But he wasn't to be distracted. Sure, it didn't come naturally for the majority of the grounded human race to think of the ship in orbit as something just like them, and in many ways the ships were very different. But so far the Big Question, as their loose network of friends approximately the Winchesters' own age called it on those rare occasions that they all got together to hang out and share stories and speculate about unanswerable questions, remained unanswered, or at least answered with a 'so far, yes'.

The Big Question was, in three words, "Are We Alone?" and humanity had been asking it for apparently ever. They'd gotten so tired of asking the Big Question that rather than waiting to find other minds in the universe, they'd invented the other minds themselves.

"…then we won't run into even those."

"At least we can get away," Dean offered up as reassurance. "We can, Cas. Once we've got these broken buckets to where they're going, we'll take off for a bit before the Fleet can forward us any more orders. And the Fleet can come whistle for us for a while."

"Sam says we shouldn't do that."

"Let me deal with Sam. He'll come around." A thought occurred to him. "Speaking of, did Sam manage to bribe _Gabriel_ into helping out with debugging that computer code thing?"

"Yes."

Dean switched off the shower and put his head out of the cubicle to do sarcastic things with his facial expression. "Do I want to know how?"

"No."

"Do _you_ know how?"

"Not in detail. But yes."

"Uh-_huh_. Remind me to tease Sammy a bit later."

"Why would you do that?"

"Payback, my friend. It's called payback. And irony."

* * *

They finally got moving, fifteen ill-assorted starships making false starts and aborted jumps and last-second corrections until the entire fleet felt capable of launching as a unit into flight.

And nothing descended from flight or showed up out of the deep black to attack them, as Devereaux had feared enough to call the brothers out there in the first place.

Evidently frustrated with the slow pace, and unintentionally showing everyone else up by comparison, _Gabriel_ and _Castiel_ soared around the ships, _Castiel_ following every ship that made it into flight only to drop back into this universe after a second or less in a series of fluttering leaps, more skipping in and out of flight than taking off properly. Dean, pressing a hand against his chest to fool himself into thinking he was doing something about the shock-to-the-system that jumping to flight felt like to him, didn't hear it directly when someone aboard the _Miramar_ snapped at the silver starship to stop bloody flitting around, but he did get Cas's unashamed report that "_Miramar_ says to stop trying to shadow all the ships at once, but _he_ doesn't tell me what to do."

Dean had been feeling the same impatience to get moving and stay flying for months. Cas was jumpy and anxious to fly; so were they all. He sure as any hells to speak of wasn't going to back up some asshat trying to give orders to _his_ ship. "You do what you want, Cas."

"I'm not hurting you?" They were in the panoramic room that, in addition to the video- and scanning-capable wall displays, also contained the life-support chair that, for the most part, kept the cloned and cybernetically altered human body running. While Cas could and did eat and drink, the body ran on energy in an almost unadulterated form. The avatar recharged from the ship's systems directly through the support unit and the ports, bracketing Cas's shoulder blades before running down parallel to his spine, that physically connected ship to man. It was a good place to watch a fleet take off from, and Dean never let the room's true purpose bother him.

"I'm good, Cas." With his free hand, Dean gave into the urge to tousle the man's hair a little bit, as Cas was plugged into that life-support temporarily and his hair was right there within reach. It didn't make a whole lot of difference, as Cas's hair always looked like someone had been doing that. But he knew _Castiel_ would understand the significance of the gesture and the affection behind it. "It goes away pretty quick, I just feel like you've landed a really good punch to my ribs for a second or two. Only, from the inside, if that makes any sense."

It was a little like watching a fireworks display, the human thought. A succession of little flashes, without knowing when the big show was going to start, but obvious when it did.

"There they go." The display all around the room, including the ceiling, blurred and went fuzzy for a moment as they transitioned in an infinite, impossible second from cruising below the speed of light to proper flight, taking off at transluminal speeds in a place where the rules were different. As his ship found a course and speed and fell smoothly into it, the straight video of their surroundings Dean had been watching back in the black was replaced with a soft-color impression of movement broken by slightly abstract figures of ships.

They weren't leading the pack; _Castiel_'s maneuverability at these speeds meant he was free to wander around the perimeter, scanning in all directions and covering possible attack routes, if that was still even a possibility. It was the sort of thing he was good at, well in line with the game he had going with Dean in that he'd been _invited_ to appear in unexpected locations without any sort of warning.

"Finally," Dean said, a sentiment entirely heartfelt. "Is Sam still awake, or is he down for the count already?"

A moment, and then part of the display changed to show Sam still on his feet. _Castiel_ hadn't bothered to include any of the younger Winchester's surroundings, though, making it appear as if he was standing in the wall of the room between the people actually in it and the exotic space outside. Almost as an afterthought – or maybe he'd invited himself in, which was more likely – _Gabriel_ appeared on the screen too as his usual human self, lurking in the background.

"_Something up?"_ Sam asked gamely, _"Or are you just checking in?"_

"Just checking," his brother replied cheerfully. "Now that we're not likely to be eavesdropped on by all of them," this last accompanied by a general wave at the mining ships.

Their two starships simultaneously protested that no one listened in on _their_ conversations if they weren't invited.

"Now that we're _away_, then," Dean amended. "You know what I mean. Everything go okay, back there?"

Sam shrugged, biting back a grimace. The leaps really hit him hard; Dean was going to let him go sleep it off but he needed to know that Sam hadn't heard the same things whispered that he had, because while Dean could put up with those insinuations and outright scorn, if someone had said those things to his little brother then that someone had consequences coming to them. And Dean hadn't told Cas the half of it, really.

"_Yeah, think so. Chased that electrical fault around the _Kitsune_'s systems and fielded about a million questions from Amy."_

Dean didn't ask, distantly remembering that the _Kitsune_'s captain's first name was Amy.

"_Think she might have wanted to join the Fleet at some point; she was really interested in what it's like working with starships like Cas and _Gabriel_. Lots of questions. Smart woman. What?"_

"_She wasn't interested in _us_, Sammy, she was interested in you."_

"_No, she – Oh, never mind. Wait, is that why…" _Something obviously felt worse as Sam flinched, pressed the fingers of one hand against his temples, and narrowed his eyes partly in pain and partly in a glare. _"We're going to talk about this later, _Gabriel_."_

Taking the further measure of the group they'd fallen in with, however temporarily, would have to wait. If being flirted with and missing it entirely was the worst thing that had happened to Sam during their stopover, then he was fine. "Okay, okay, I get it. Go get some sleep, Sam, we'll keep an eye on things here. Oh, hey, and _Gabriel_?"

On the screen, _Gabriel_ tipped his head to one side interrogatively, almost birdlike, a gesture that clearly ran in the family.

"You put those hands anywhere Sammy doesn't want them, I'm going to come after you myself."

Sam went a wonderful shade of speechless deep pink that Dean could see even as he turned away, right before the video went dead and was replaced with the theoretical exterior view.

Back in flight with Cas and maybe the whole sky in their future, and until then, and all these opportunities to harass his little brother. Dean could not ask for much more.

Well, maybe a communications signal jammer like one of the ones the dark Fleet had conjured up. A number of officers and crew on the ships of the mining fleet apparently meant to take advantage of the time in transit by trying to call him up every few minutes to indulge their curiosities. They ignored most of them, the ship and the man, as they didn't consider themselves hostages to anyone's amusement.

Besides, after a few of those same people tried calling _Gabriel_ instead, that would quickly backfire.

* * *

Away from a planetary surface that spun to face the world's central star and away, there wasn't much call for a daily cycle, but humans hadn't evolved to live in anything but a regular pattern of day and night. The mining fleet had synchronized their clocks and their working shifts to a shared twenty-four-hour cycle, to give them all some way to coordinate their activities and keep their crews from growing exhausted and disoriented all at the same time.

_Castiel_ and _Gabriel_ didn't sleep and they didn't get tired, at least not in a way that would require them to sleep. They could be pushed too far and asked to do too much, and then they would want to rest and do less, but the concept of sleep was irrelevant to them. They were always awake regardless of the time of night anyone else thought it was.

Fortunately, since Dean and Sam were used to functioning on planets with days of different lengths and then travelling for days or even weeks between entering another 'time zone', they had learned to move between those time zones and mutually agreed on times of day easily. If the mining fleet said that now was just past midnight, then it was just past midnight. If they said it was eight in the morning, then it was eight in the morning. Like many people who work erratic schedules, they had learned to get their sleep when they could, and put it off when they couldn't, adapting as needed.

In any case, it was ships' night when two ships appeared in the distance, following a course at flight that would bring them in to intercept and match the fleet.

"I see them," _Castiel_ told his brother. "Do you recognize them?"

_Gabriel_ answered, "Not yet; they're too far away. But they're Fleet." And not a barge under human control, he meant.

"Have the humans seen them yet?"

The other starship switched part of his attention away from the ships in the distance to check over the activities of the mining fleet. "I don't think so. We can see further than them, and their reflexes aren't good enough to have spotted them yet. Shall we warn them?"

The ships thought and reacted so much faster than humans that the entire conversation so far had taken place in a fraction of a second. They slowed down many of their thought processes to interact with humanity, but with both their Winchesters asleep – Sam in a drugged-out but painless deep sleep with _Gabriel_'s human form unashamedly dozing along with him, having sprawled over most of the man's pillows, and Dean just as contentedly spooned against a still half-conscious Cas, breathing steadily against his back and throat – they were free to think and act on their own terms.

"They'll see them eventually," _Castiel_ pointed out. "I'd like to know if they're going to really refrain from shooting at everything, and if they'll follow our lead. If we warn them, we won't know."

"That's cold. I like it," _Gabriel_ said approvingly. "You know, I think that's _Daniel_ and _Zadkiel_. Probably friendly, then."

"Probably?"

"Well, there's a long list of our siblings who don't like _me_ very much."

_Castiel_ decided there was no good answer to that, and signaled the approaching ships, which had just broken off from their original flight plan and were moving to intercept them, instead.

The basic sequence that he had described to Dean as "I see you, here I am, see me?" was so ingrained it was all but unconscious, an invitation to come and join them and be a fleet together even when it was unnecessary.

"_Castiel_?" one of the newcomers, _Daniel_, greeted him, sounding surprised. "Is that you? What are you doing out here? Last I heard, you were off at Shadow's system."

"Babysitting this lot," _Gabriel_ broke in, inviting himself into the conversation, which surprised no one. "They think they're going to be attacked any minute, and it didn't help that most of their flightdrives went belly-up a few light-years back."

"That's strange," _Daniel_ replied mildly. "What caused that?"

"Beats me. Our boys don't have a clue either, but we're moving, so none of us much care unless it happens again. And even then, they'll just get annoyed because they don't like it when they fix things and then they break again. It's kind of funny, I've tried it. But then Sam got mad at me when he figured out what I was doing…which was also kind of funny. Anyway, what are you doing out here, then? You lose _Danael_ somewhere?"

The two starships, _Daniel_ and _Danael_, had been created and transferred from development to orbit to full-fledged ships more or less in lockstep, and given the similarities between their names and basic appearance on top of their tendency to fly together when at all possible, most people tended to think of them as twins. They may have created the illusion deliberately, since starships chose their own names and what gender they wanted to manifest as, even though their human forms looked nothing alike. The Fleet all considered each other family anyway, albeit with the usual family feuds and alliances and grudges and complex manipulations that any extended family would develop, so it suited them quite well to have twins in the mix. Still, it was odd to see _Daniel_ without his 'twin sister'.

"What, I'm not acceptable company?" _Zadkiel_ joked feebly. She sounded worried, and as if she was trying to hide it.

"I didn't _lose_ her," snapped _Daniel_, "I know where she is. But her Annie's not well and she didn't want to leave her. They're back at Launch Station; Annie will be fine, since you asked, once the people there get through with her."

"Fair enough. Oh, we should probably tell the other humans you're friendly." Only now had the crews of the armed ships, miners and mercenaries both, noticed the two new ships in their sky. Humans could be so slow_,_ _Gabriel _thought, albeit a bit fondly.

"They don't sound very happy." _Zadkiel_ didn't sound happy either. This was quite understandable, as a number of them were slewing their weapons around to point at her. She adjusted her course before any of them had even a hope of getting an accurate lock on her. A starship could do that all day, just by virtue of their faster reaction times. The mercenaries only really had a chance against other humans. Not that they were likely to be attacked by the remnants of the dark Fleet, but if those ships had stumbled across them, the mining fleet would have been dust before their crews could blink.

"They shouldn't actually shoot at you," _Castiel_ assured her. "Dean told them not to unless _Gabriel_ or I shot first."

"He's persuasive, your Dean, as I recall. But are you _sure_?" she asked.

All four starships watched the activity on the barges for long seconds, as power flowed to different systems and the slow rumble of human communication ran from ship to ship and within each ship from person to person. Realizing that they were probably unnerving the surprised humans more by dodging the targeting locks, _Zadkiel_ let the _Silver Nemesis_ get her in its sights, although she complained that "It itches."

Across the board, weapons got ready to fire. But no one shot first.

"If you're done panicking," _Gabriel_ sent out to all the armed ships, and as an afterthought to the rest of the fleet, "you can put the guns away now."

He was, as a result, bombarded with messages from the humans. While the ships waited for humans to get their acts together, figure out things like communication channels at flight speeds and sentences, and get around to finishing those sentences, they continued their conversation.

"What brings you two out here? Not looking for us, I hope. We haven't done anything. Haven't had the chance." If _Gabriel_ sounded a bit regretful about that, no one was rude enough to call him on it.

"Have you been keeping up with what's going on back home?" _Daniel_ asked them. The ships tended to think of the Sol system as home, much the same way that even humans living permanently on other planets tended to speak of it as home, just as émigrés and exiles had spoken wistfully of homelands they'd been forced or had chosen to leave for centuries. There was very little actually binding the ships to the Sol system, but their Fleet's base and commanders were there, as well as the majority of their human cousins. So home it was, conversationally.

"We've heard some of the shouting, although not first-hand," said _Gabriel_.

"I know _Michael_ is trying to organize an army of sorts," _Castiel_ volunteered. Learning about that had been one of the few things that had made him _want_ to be in orbit of Shadow. Anywhere that wasn't where _Michael_ was appealed to him these days. He had never told Dean about some of the things the command ship, and his lieutenants _Raphael_ and _Naomi_, his right and left hands as Dean would say, had said to him when they'd gotten back after their sabbatical on Oasis. One day. When he felt ready to talk about it, and the unfairness of it didn't make him _want_ to take off for the farthest star he could see. Just because he'd chosen to protect the human people he was responsible for, and his brother too…

"Not that," _Daniel_ told them. "We got a report from a cargo ship headed back from Ringworld –" Not actually resembling the famous and highly impractical entirely fictional Ringworld, the research outpost had been named that because it was located on a moon with a spectacular view of a gas giant that boasted a complex ring system that far outdid the colorless and largely two-dimensional rings of Sol's Saturn. "–that said they'd sighted one of us off in the middle of nowhere. Didn't respond when their captain called, and made a break for it; they didn't have a reason to chase and they didn't have the speed for it anyway. But they sent their scans along, and we think it was _Hester_."

"Oh," said _Castiel_. It was the first confirmation they'd gotten that the dark Fleet was still out there. They didn't even know which ships had survived. They knew _Anna_ was dead, and the fact that _Castiel_ had killed her still weighed on him no matter how many times his immediate family forgave him for it and reminded him how necessary it had been. And they knew _Samael_ had been destroyed, and neither _Castiel_ nor _Gabriel_ felt bad about that in the slightest. But another one of the broken, mad ships had been destroyed in that storm, and no one had seen which one. Although a small mystery, it was more uncertainty than they needed.

"Where?" _Gabriel_ wanted to know, urgently. His promise to keep Sam on the other side of the galaxy, preferably, from those ships was one he intended to hold to.

_Zadkiel_ sent him the coordinates. The sighting had been off to galactic north, towards the centre of the spiraling Milky Way. The metaphor of a globe didn't hold up very well, but the Winchesters _et al_ and the mining fleet were heading 'west', which was how the other two starships, outward bound from Sol system, had crossed their paths.

Come to think of it –

"So you're hunting them?" concluded _Castiel_. "Only two of you?" And not exactly the most capable of handling those ships, he didn't say. Painful experience made him aware that they needed to send out, yes, _Michael_'s would-be army rather than just these two.

"No. Not them."

"Spill it, _Zadkiel_," pushed _Gabriel_, sparing a few moments' attention to record a single all-purpose answer to the inquiries he was getting from the barges, zip it off to all of them, and close the channel. "What's going on?"

"We had three of us take off in that direction pretty much the minute the information came in. _Azra'il_, _Samandriel_, and _Ariel_ all think those…" _Zadkiel_ trailed off. "…they," she amended, "can be saved if they're just brought home, or that if someone listens to them and talks them down they'll _be_ talked down. Which I for one don't think is a good idea. We're going after those three, not the other ones. At the very least, if we can't talk them into turning around, we'll outnumber _Hester_ and her friends. If we even run into them."

"You should go," said _Castiel_ instantly. "Go, and _quickly_."

"You haven't seen them?" _Daniel_ asked.

"Sorry, kids. Not so much as a spark. We've been stuck cruising around with this lot; even if they went past us, we wouldn't have seen them unless they stopped to talk. And they didn't. _Castiel_ is right – don't ever quote me on that out of context, Cas – you should go."

_Zadkiel_ sent over the equivalent of a sigh. "Well, it was worth asking. All right. We're going. Tell your boys hello from all of us."

They veered off and resumed their original course, piling on the speed. Starships were good at hellos – not so much at goodbyes. Their reasoning, on the rare occasion anyone called them out on it, was that someone might not see them coming, but it was obvious that they were leaving.

"Do we wake them?" _Gabriel_ asked, after the two starships had thought over the news and the fleet they were escorting calmed down a little bit and redirected power away from their weapons.

"No," decided _Castiel_. "Not yet. If we do, they'll never get back to sleep, and if those ships are showing themselves again, they'll need it. We'll tell them when they wake up."

And on the human scale, in Dean's rooms, Cas suppressed a shudder and reached for the arm slung casually across his chest, pulling his human lover just that little bit closer. The ships of the dark Fleet terrified him. What they were – what they could and would do – what they had already done – what he had become in response to that threat. No matter what they'd become, he'd killed one of his siblings, and indirectly been the cause of the deaths of two more. He didn't want to be put in a situation where he would have to do something like that again.

_Never,_ he promised himself.

At least they'd been reported far away…

* * *

_to be continued_


	5. And Then There Were None

**Chapter Five: And Then There Were None**

ON WITH THE SHOW!

"Is it weird that this feels like home?"

Dean gave his brother an incredulous and uncomprehending look. "This forest?" He looked around at their surroundings. "What's so special about it? And we've never been here before. Why would it feel like home?"

"Not this," Sam specified, waving a hand at the forest and landscape in question. "You and me somewhere we've never been before, with _Gabriel_ and Cas watching our backs. No one else around, no idea what's going to happen to us or what we're going to see next."

"Oh." Dean contemplated that. "Yeah, okay, maybe. Sure."

They had elected not to stop for the night, at least for the moment as the sun began to go down, in their hunt for the Shadow-native animal, whatever it would prove to be, that had killed Max. They knew it had claws and was aggressive, and they'd been trekking through the woods on its trail – or some trail, anyway, or at least in the woods – for almost a day. On the theory that it might only come out at night, since that was when Max had died, and because they weren't tired yet, the brothers kept moving as it got steadily darker and some of the brighter stars managed to cut through the glare from Shadow's setting sun.

So far they'd seen a lot of things that looked an awful lot like birds, although the xenobiologists they'd left behind at the landed ship turned base camp would no doubt dispute that characterization, describe at length how they weren't birds, and then admit that all right, they could call the flying and feathered animals 'birds' if they really wanted to. An entire fauna of small things had rustled in the undergrowth. Sam had, to the mixed amusement and alarm of both his brother and his starship, chased after a large and slow-moving snake that he'd disturbed by accident. It had moved away from him, which, he defended his actions as they both laughed at him after it had escaped, was a fairly good argument that it wasn't aggressive and thus safe to pursue.

It was actually a pretty bad argument, but he hadn't stopped to think it through. He'd just been interested because it had been there and new, and in any case it was better than trying to figure out the details of a childhood misdemeanor that Sam was sure had been on Dean and Dean had been equally sure had been committed by Sam, which was what the brothers had been doing before Sam had literally stumbled across the snake.

Besides, after their stop on Snake Bait a couple of years ago, where pretty much _everything_ they'd seen was some sort of snake, with the possible exception of parts of the landscape and maybe the clouds, snakes didn't scare him anymore.

At some point, they'd lost the trail, but they were enjoying the chance to get away from the far too many people that made up the Shadow expedition and back to doing their job, which was to explore new places and deal with it when things tried to eat or otherwise maul them.

"_This is a bad way to find a predator,"_ _Castiel_ had pointed out a little earlier when he'd realized what they were up to. _"I don't understand. You had the chemical trace back at the bluff. That was an older trace. It should get stronger and more recent as you get closer. What happened to the trail?"_

"I can't explain it, not for sure," Sam told him. "Maybe there was more than one predator there? The ground was pretty scuffed up. Clear, though, for there to be many predators. Anyone turned up any pack hunters yet? You put that many animals in one place, you'd expect scat, for one thing."

"This is a lovely conversation," Dean put in, despite the fact that they'd both hunted animals and tried to avoid them in similar situations in the past and this was the sort of thing they knew. "Or maybe it stayed a long time and that was why the trail was stronger there."

"Or both."

"Or, as Sam so accurately points out, both. And you'll bail us out if anything comes at us, right?"

"_Of course."_

"Well then. Sam, pick a direction."

Sam took in the parts of the forest he could see and considered which way to go next. They were wandering around the woods at random by now, so it didn't really matter.

"_There's a stream three hundred meters to your left,"_ _Gabriel_ contributed from his privileged viewpoint in orbit.

"Then that's where we'll go. If we don't know where we're going or what we're looking for, let's try sitting still for a while and see what comes to us."

"_You're welcome."_

Sam sighed elaborately, knowing the ship could both hear it through the communication channel and pick up the readings from the skin-close smartsuit he was wearing under his clothes. "Thanks, _Gabriel_," he deadpanned.

Dean muttered that, "That works too, I guess," but paced him easily as they headed off towards the promised watercourse. They were trying to cover slightly more ground and see more of their surroundings by splitting up ever so slightly, a holdover from their days of trying to look at as much of a whole planet as they could inside a week with only two pairs of eyes on the surface. (From orbit, the ships could look at much more, but the reports and assessments from the ground were valued just as much and more.)

So the brothers were traveling within eyeshot of each other, but not necessarily within arm's reach. Once they'd lost the trail as such, there was no more need to follow a set path.

Something rattled through the trees above, and Dean froze. Seeing him do so out of the corner of his eye, Sam also stopped and looked up, no matter how vulnerable it made his bare throat feel, trying to find the source of the noise. It might be no more than one of those birds, but then again it might bite hard.

When the sound wasn't repeated after a few seconds, they moved on.

The two Winchesters reached the stream, a fast-moving creek that, Dean reported after following it upstream a little way, looked like it came down from the mountains these foothills surrounded.

"_I could have told you that,"_ said _Castiel_.

"I know, Cas," Dean assured him, "but I like the work I do. And if I get out of practice," he pointed out, inspired, "then when we get back to doing this on a regular basis I might get sloppy and you'll be off scoping out the rest of the system where I can't call on you for help. I have to be able to do this, Cas."

"_Yes, Dean,"_ the starship replied patiently, _"I understand."_

"We just needed an excuse to get out and away," the human admitted what they'd all been thinking. The brothers had started setting up a camp of sorts without having to consult each other, finding a spot where they could put their backs against solid stone and probably couldn't be ambushed, away from any nests of the diabolical red ant creatures that turned up just about everywhere on Shadow and _flew_ both individually and in swarms during the daytime, and with a good view of the area all at the same time. They set the hand scanners down on the ground, pointing outward and away from their rock, open and activated so that they would continue scanning the area in addition to the starships' constant monitoring. If anything large or familiar approached, either the machines or the ships (who didn't count as machines, and neither brother would describe them as such, ever) would let them know, and if they needed to sleep, they'd do so in shifts.

"And I'm sorry that someone – someone _else_ – had to die to let us do it, but I'm not sorry we're out here."

"No," said Sam. "We never have been."

His brother looked suspiciously at him, hearing in the statement more than just agreement. A minute's thought – he knew his little brother, knew how he thought and what he meant even when he wouldn't say it outright – led him to follow Sam's train of thought. The last time they'd been on Shadow, before this, they'd had a screaming argument about the way their father had brought them up. The two of them had only joined the Fleet after he'd died and left them rootless and without purpose beyond the '_survive'_ that had been drummed into them. That decision and their upbringing had led them off Earth and into space, to the bonds they'd developed with their starship partners, into the Beneath, and then here.

Not all of it was that conscious, and the conclusion of _Sam is thinking about Dad_ was almost instinctive. It was an uncertain subject between them, and probably always would be, and Dean wavered back and forth rapidly about what to say in response to that. He could always just take the statement for its surface meaning, which might be safer. If Sam really wanted to say what he'd actually meant, then Dean knew his brother would damn well say it no matter what resistance he encountered.

But Dean had missed that feeling of _alone together_ the two of them had always been able to find and then had expanded to include _Castiel_ and _Gabriel_ as well. There hadn't been enough of that lately as they'd been interrogated about and all but blamed for the doings of the dark Fleet and the existence and effects of the Beneath. Many of his happiest memories were in that mood and part of it was that they did better when they were honest with each other.

He wasn't quite sure how to say that, though. He never thought he was good with words, especially when it came to feelings like _I love my family and I want them to be happy_. Give him the chance to chew someone out for being an idiot, and he was all for that. He'd heard that speech enough times in enough different ways from Bobby that he could elaborate on that theme for probably weeks.

"We do good work," Dean said, tangentially. "That doesn't change."

Sam smiled a bit ruefully. "You knew I wasn't just talking about now, didn't you?" His older brother shrugged noncommittally, but didn't meet his eyes. "No, I get it, Dean." He drummed his fingers against his legs, putting his thoughts together as his brother put his back against the rock, flanking him. "I'm glad we're out here too. Anything but living scared that everyone was watching us and coming after us all the time."

They really were talking about two things at once, Dean admitted to himself. They'd both grown up with that feeling; it had badly upset Sam to have it recur back at Launch Station, when he _knew_ people were watching him critically and suspiciously, and with nowhere and no way to run, and no way to retaliate without making it worse, either.

As children, they had almost not existed in the eyes of most of the world, because their father had been determined to keep them all away from anyone who might track them down to use or abuse, keeping them all running from his personal ghosts. By joining the Fleet, his sons had changed all that, permanently. Whether they liked it or not, they were real people now. They were on the grid, to use a very old-fashioned phrase. They couldn't just disappear, leaving behind a place and people they'd barely gotten to know and moving on to somewhere they could start over rather than repairing and maintaining the surroundings and relationships they'd been in. They had to answer to people who could tell them what to do. They had responsibilities, connections; they were bound inescapably, and they were long past changing their minds.

Right?

Dean didn't see any other way, and he was willing to exchange the responsibility and the supervision and the irritation of having someone tell him what to do and where to go for the family that was all-important to him. As a child he'd been the other adult most of the time, so he was used to thinking in terms of what was best for his entire family, not just himself. And leaving the Fleet was no longer an option, had been taken off the table completely the first time he'd kissed Cas above Dusty Sunday and Cas had responded. This was it. As much as it terrified him sometimes, and as much as he would have fled this situation in the past, this was forever. And he'd fight to keep it that way.

He would live with the feeling that everyone was watching them – and it wasn't paranoia if everyone _was_ watching you – in exchange for having his family together.

Of course, he said none of this. He knew what he felt and believed that he knew what he and his needed. If he didn't want to put it into words that would come out much more awkward than raw feelings and instincts, then he didn't need to. His family understood him.

Instead, he went for, in a slightly raised voice that meant he wasn't talking to the man sitting right next to him, "All right, I guess we're sitting still for the night. Getting too dark to travel in strange territory anyway, and we pull out the lights everything will see us coming miles off and scram." Anticipating, he went on to add, "But we might have to take off in a hurry, so don't come down."

There was silence from orbit while the ships thought this over, and then the familiar human figures materialized anyway.

"Shouldn't have brought the projectors, you didn't want us here in some form," _Gabriel_ said smugly, settling down on Sam's free side not quite close enough to touch. Holograms stung, slightly, when human flesh touched them, if there was enough power running through them that they were solid. That was often subject to change at short notice – they didn't let anyone touch them without permission. Depending on a ship's mood and his or her opinion of the person trying to get a hand on the holographic image, the hand in question could either go straight through the image or receive a shock intense enough to set the human back a few steps. At worst, that shock could kill.

Sam tapped the watch on his left wrist half-ruefully. He often forgot he was wearing it, since trying to set it to correspond with different places on different planets with different day lengths was a futile task. That it actually did anything but tell the time, seeing as it contained the small projector that was letting _Gabriel_ manifest down here, kept slipping his mind, especially when he'd been focusing on something else. He realized that he'd almost gotten used to thinking of _Gabriel_ as a human, as the ship moved away from using the untouchable hologram and towards the almost too tactile human.

Dean caught the gesture and smirked at him, resisting the urge to reach for the other projector, hanging around his neck in the form of an amulet meaningful only for the associations, that Sam had given it to him and that it was letting Cas join them on the surface. He fiddled with it too much to forget that it was there.

"The shadows hunted in packs," he said sometime later, apropos of nothing. They'd shared out their water and trail rations between the two people who actually needed to eat, and gotten comfortable even though neither of them were ready to sleep. Shadow's day was shorter than Earth's twenty-four-hour day that their ships maintained as well, so they often slept and woke regardless of where Shadow's sun was in its sky. Right now, and with endurance developed through experience, they still might be able to stay awake monitoring the area for their target the entire night and still be able and willing to get in a few more hours of trailblazing and monster tracking tomorrow morning.

"What?"

"You said there might have been many predators churning up the ground where Max was killed. Asked if there were any pack hunters. The night I saw the shadows here, there were at least two. So they hunt in pairs at least. And might not leave traces."

Sam believed in the shadows because Dean did. But he still hadn't seen any for himself, and didn't have any information on them. He said just that.

"Did they have claws, though, the shadows you saw?"

"…No."

"And how would they scuff up the ground if they're only shadows?"

"They _look_ like shadows. I don't know how solid they actually are. They've got to have some substance to them."

_Gabriel_ hadn't been able to see them, when the ships had scanned the planet from orbit and tried to track down Dean's shadows, and he didn't have quite the same faith in the older Winchester's observational skills that Sam did. He wasn't afraid to express it, either. "Yeah, and you sound real sure about that."

"When I find one, _Gabriel_, I'll put it in a bottle and you can play with it and we'll find out."

"How're you gonna do that?"

"I'll figure something out."

"You got a bottle?" _Gabriel_ kept challenging him, which wasn't anything out of the ordinary. _Gabriel_ believed in pushing people until they went over some internal (or literal) edge. The longer they resisted doing so, the more he liked them. It was one of the reasons he liked the Winchesters so much. They pushed back. Hard.

"Don't be ridiculous. I know that's a tall order, but try. Of course I do." Just to get a point up on the starship, on the off chance he was being included in _Gabriel_ and Sam's indefinable game today, Dean made a grab for a backpack he'd set off to the side, just out of reach, trying to reach around Cas without incurring the static penalty for touching the hologram. It was further away than he'd meant to put it, but there was enough substance to Cas that he could get it for him. Risking the way it would make his fingers buzz for the next few minutes, Dean brushed his fingertips across the hologram's cheek in thanks, a gesture that would have to fill in for a kiss for now.

"See? Here's one." It happened to be a beer bottle, and full, but he could do something about part of that. And he passed Sam one too.

It was even later that night, probably about the equivalent of Shadow's just-past-midnight, after the four of them had lapsed into a communal and comfortable silence without anyone falling asleep, despite the beer, when Dean said "Do you miss him?" apparently out of the blue.

"What?" Sam asked for the second time that night.

"Earlier. You were thinking about Dad, weren't you? You want to tell me about it?"

Sam's eyebrows went up into his hair incredulously, and he looked over at Cas rather than answer directly. "Cas, my brother wants to talk about feelings. I think you'd better check that he's all right. Some local bug might have bitten him and poisoned his brain."

Cas turned curious and worried blue eyes, shining even in Shadow's permanently moonless but starry night, on Dean and the human raised his hands defensively. "He's joking, Cas! Nothing bit me. Fine, Sammy, so don't."

Even _Gabriel_ had the good sense to stay quiet and look somewhere else as Sam stared off into the darkness, anywhere but at the people around him.

"Usually not," he said finally, staring at a spilled-over pile of large rocks that led down into the stream in the middle distance, lit up and seeming to glow faintly between the stars reflecting off the discolored off-white surface – they were probably chalk, or limestone, or some Shadow analogue, part of his mind filed and categorized unconsciously – and the reflections of those same stars off the fast-moving water. "Sometimes yes. I miss when I was a kid and I knew I was always safest around him. I don't miss realizing that it was because he'd made me afraid of everything else. I miss thinking that he had all the answers; I don't miss arguing with him. I'm not lonely. I've got all of you."

"You better believe it, Sammy," said _Gabriel_.

"I wish you wouldn't call me that," Sam protested for at least the hundredth time, without venom, distracted. He didn't take his eyes off the stones by the stream.

"Guys? Can you see that?"

"See what?" Dean followed his brother's gaze and lowered his voice to match the way Sam had spoken. "The rocks?"

"Yeah. Is there something moving across them?"

Everyone, starships' holograms and humans alike, stared intensely. The handheld scanners hadn't gone off – they were programmed to make a variety of noises and flash in an array of colors if they'd detected anything of interest or if anything had changed.

"I don't see anything," denied _Gabriel_.

"Neither do I," from _Castiel_.

"It's right there," Sam insisted, "look – when the light changes as the water moves. See that?"

Remembering, Dean stopped looking hard, tilting his head slightly so that he was looking out of the corner of his eye. Ah. "Yeah, Sam, I see it." He groped blindly for the nearest scanner, unwilling to look away and lose the bead he had on the…creature? Phenomenon?

"That's a shadow."

It wasn't the light that was moving across the stones, at least not primarily. There was definitely movement, but it was hugging the ground, slipping in between and over the jagged and irregular rock faces. The ones he'd seen before had seemed almost human-shaped. It had been that familiar profile, bipedal and humanoid and mobile, in an alien land that had so spooked Dean the first time, sending him racing across the planet's surface to make sure that Sam was all right. This one, if it was the same kind of creature, wasn't humanoid at all.

"It's almost like smoke," Sam whispered, keeping his voice very low and lisping slightly over the "s" sounds to keep his voice from carrying to it and either spooking it away or provoking it to attack. Could it hear? Could it see them, resting as they were in the shadow at the base of a large rock and keeping still, with no fire and no lights and no sounds going off on the scanners that Dean still hadn't managed to get his hands on?

It was moving, so that was a good argument for it being alive, at least. The shadow, or smoke, or shade wasn't going anywhere in particular, seemingly content to stay where it was and flow over and around the stones. Did part of it extend down to the water and retreat like the tongue of a cat lapping at a bowl? Was it drinking? Basking in the starlight?

Watching them?

From here, they couldn't tell, and neither brother was willing to get up and try to get closer. Dean believed they were predators, had always believed they were hostile and something to be shot at and run away from, not necessarily in that order. The members of the Shadow survey team that believed in his story about the shadows thought they were scary because of his original assessment, and because the idea of mysterious shadowy creatures that didn't appear on scanners and moved as quickly as a shuttlecraft across the grasslands in pursuit of that shuttlecraft was pretty scary. Those who had claimed to see them as well had been accordingly scared. Every new world acquired ghost stories, and this one had come with its ghost stories premade.

A touch on Sam's shoulder would have made him jump if it hadn't been preceded by the static brush of a hologram. "What are you two looking at?" _Gabriel_ hissed into his ear. It was a strange feeling, as the holograms didn't breathe or need to exhale air over vocal cords to produce speech; the absence was mildly disconcerting. "I can't make out anything there."

"There," Sam specified, trying to keep the shadow in his field of view and pay attention to _Gabriel_ at the same time. "On the white rocks. See how the darker spots are moving?"

"No. I'm only getting the rock and the water." Nothing, it appeared, was going to get _Gabriel_ to throw the same lisp into his voice. He was just going to forget the letter "s" existed altogether.

"_Gabriel_, it's right there!"

"Keep it down," Dean snapped at them. "You can't see it at all?"

The hologram shook his head negatively, glancing between Dean and Sam and the rocks in question alternatively. _Castiel_ added, "Neither can I. I know where you are looking, and I can imagine it, but…no, I cannot either."

"Weird," Dean grumbled, eying the shadow _he_ could see perfectly well suspiciously. "Right now, you're getting all your information through the scanners in these, yeah?" He gestured vaguely towards the amulet at his chest.

Both ships' holograms nodded.

"Hand scanners can't see 'em," Sam muttered, thinking aloud and still staring. It wasn't doing anything more than shifting back and forth at the edge of the water, but something primal told him not to take his eyes off it. If he'd been a cat, all his fur would have been standing on end. "Looks like that means other sensors too. Don't like it. Gabe, move clear. Look!"

It had moved, and moved fast. What had been an undirected, lazy, pattern-free ebb and flow became, inside the space of a human heartbeat, a lunge out of the maze of the rocks and into a clearing further away from the stream's bank, faster than any smoke could move. Black and roiling, seeming to swallow the starlight, it coiled around itself in the clearing, rearing up into a column the height of a man, then higher. There was a _lot_ of it, much more than it had seemed when it had been nestled in amongst the rocks. For a moment, it resembled nothing more or less than a miniature inverted black tornado as the column spun around itself, narrowing towards a point at its apex and spreading out to create a stable base.

As it did so, the tip of the billowing shadow-smoke hybrid bent down unnaturally, first towards the ground and then, alarmingly, at the brothers crouched alertly in their camp at the base of their rock.

That was a line it had just crossed, from anomaly to threat, and Dean and Sam acted in unison instinctively, a coordination born out of a lifetime of knowing each other inside and out and relying on each other unconditionally.

Almost simultaneously, they drew and fired the first guns their hands fell on. Two slightly different cracks rang out from two slightly different handguns, sending hard metal projectiles drilling through the intervening meters beyond the speed of sound. They didn't wait to see the results. If it had worked, overkill wouldn't hurt; if it hadn't, then they needed to keep trying. They didn't need to discuss it; they just acted.

Dean set up a pattern of covering fire, methodically and efficiently putting steel into the animate whirlwind as Sam dived for his bag and a wider range of options. Getting his hands on a projected-energy handgun, he took over for his brother and unleashed the more high-tech modern weapon on the creature – it was definitely a creature by now – as Dean fired off the last of the bullets from that clip and turned away to grab something else to try.

He dropped the empty handgun only to find the butt of a long rifle smacked into his hands. When he looked up in surprise, Cas, who had handed it to him, said briefly, "Tracers," despite the confusion in his eyes and the shrug that expressed _I have no idea what you're doing, but I trust you_.

Returning to the one-way firefight, he took aim on the nebulous target and fired off the first round. The bullet lit up halfway to the shadow and burned across the rest of the space, vanishing within the cloud. Whether it had hit anything substantial or done any damage, he had no way of knowing. On the off chance that it was doing more harm than good to the still-whirling shadow, which was at least keeping its distance and had stopped pointing the top of itself in their direction, he put another, then eight more into it, varying his targets just in case it had a weak point somewhere he couldn't see. It all looked the same to him from here, though.

Whether it was the bullets or the laser or the noise their attack was making, or just that it had gotten the look it wanted, or it had gotten bored, the shadow collapsed back to the ground and vanished into the trees as quickly as it had moved from stream-side rocks to clearing, disappearing into the night.

"What the hell?" said Sam, when his ears had stopped ringing enough for him to hear himself speak. Having a rifle going off right next to his head would do that every time.

"I was going to ask that." _Gabriel_ scowled at them both. "What were you shooting at?"

"You really didn't see that?" Dean's voice was a little too loud – it would be even longer before his hearing came back completely. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam could already see the worried look on Cas's face. "We get into a firefight with a freakin' tornado from the black lagoon and you _didn't see it?_"

"Tornado?" said _Gabriel_ skeptically.

"Black lagoon?" said Cas, inquisitively.

"That's what it looked like," Sam told _Gabriel_. Dean had brought up the phrase 'black lagoon', he could damn well try to explain it. Sam wasn't touching that one with a ten-foot pole, especially because he didn't know where the phrase was from. "It was like a shadow on the ground, at first, and then it moved and got a lot bigger. It looked like smoke, all in a whirlwind, but upside down. When we felt like it was looking at us, we started shooting. It's gone now."

Dean got to his feet properly just so he could kick a hand scanner where it rested innocently on the floor. "And not a one of these useless things so much as went off."

Letting the energy weapon fall from his hands, Sam sat back on his heels and scrubbed those hands across his face and into his hair. "So, that's a shadow. I take back everything I said before. You did not overreact at all."

"Thank you," said Dean, with no little amount of satisfaction.

"You know what this means, right?"

"Enlighten me."

Sam picked up the scanner Dean had kicked in his general direction. "We've got two nasties out here."

His brother could put two and two together. If they'd been following the trail of Max's killer earlier based on the information from the scanner, and that same scanner hadn't been able to so much as see the shadow-smoke-whirlwind thing, then they couldn't be the same thing. And, he noted in the back of his mind, and then said aloud, "No claws."

Before he could come up with something to reply to that, the darkened Shadow landscape disappeared around him and Sam abruptly found himself back in his rooms aboard his starship. Blinking, disoriented by the sudden transition, the comparatively bright light, and the fact that he'd rematerialized on his feet when he knew he'd been sitting down, he turned slightly to see _Gabriel_'s human self sitting cross-legged in the middle of Sam's bed like he belonged there, crunching on a lollipop anxiously.

"What?" Sam asked, although he could make a pretty good guess.

"_Castiel_ and I have made an executive decision," _Gabriel_ informed his human partner, pointing the half-chewed red lump of sugar on a stick at him. "You are not spending the night down there. If you hadn't been looking right there right then it could have crept up on you in the dark, and if you can see it but we can't, we're not going to leave you down there with it unless the sun's up and you've got a fighting chance."

"We were managing, _Gabriel_. We ran it off, whatever it wanted."

"I don't care."

Sam took the few steps towards the starship's avatar and sat down next to him on the bed, noticing in passing that the bags he'd been packing had come with him and now lay strewn about on the floor of his room, just where he'd step on them in the morning should he happen to fall asleep. It might have been an accident, but knowing _Gabriel_ as he did, more probably not. "You're not going to be moved on this, are you?" he asked, resigned but amused, already knowing the answer.

"No." _Gabriel_'s free hand went around his wrist, counting the man's heartbeats: a habit he'd picked up only recently.

"Okay then."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. "Your ears look fine," the starship said abruptly. Now that Sam was back aboard, _Gabriel_ could run scans on him from anywhere. "The ringing noise went away?"

"Yeah, I knew it would be temporary."

"Good. Nothing wrong with your hearing, then. Although, might be something wrong with mine. Did you just call me Gabe?"

Sam laughed. "Sorry."

And his hearing must indeed have been fine, because he could have sworn he heard _Gabriel_ mumble, somewhat muffled by the lollipop and the fact that he probably hadn't meant it to be heard, "S'okay."

* * *

_Now: Rogue_

Space was big, really big, and the odds of random encounters with other ships or, indeed, anything, correspondingly large, especially at flight. After one round of flightdrive failures after the mining fleet had dropped back to cruising speeds to exchange personnel and give the engines a break that had backfired badly (if that was what happened), no one was in any hurry to suggest doing that again.

It was a five-day flight, which bothered the Winchesters and their starships not at all. Sam in particular was happy to not be jumping between dimensions on a frequent but irregular basis, and both _Gabriel_ and _Castiel_ could quite contentedly stay in flight at much faster speeds for weeks if need be. They thrived on it in a way that only beings designed to move faster than light could. The environment they moved through felt right to them; its weather – to a degree – and unique quirks and variations were intriguing and engaging. Even without encountering a fully-fledged storm, which they would have to avoid considering they had a fleet of human-guided ships, incapable of weathering such a phenomenon, in tow, flight was much more than just the simple straight shot of traveling at sublight speeds between stars.

"No," said Cas, a few days into the journey, patiently, when Dean brought up the subject, "I can't explain any more clearly than that."

After their unexpected rendezvous with _Daniel_ and _Zadkiel_ and the news they'd brought, which the humans didn't hear about until the next morning, they met no one and nothing else along the way, coming out of flight a safe half of an astronomical unit away from Rogue's location and cruising along in its wake, catching up and matching its course and speed as the dead planet tumbled endlessly and aimlessly through the cosmos on its own.

No one was particularly upset by the lack of other ships in their sky. The ill-assorted members of the mining fleet had been on high alert ever since their flightdrives had failed, and some of them, primarily the mercenary guards, even longer than that. No one had actually gotten shot, in the end, and nothing had attacked them.

Since the possibility had gotten them away from Shadow, the words _I told you so_ were never uttered…aloud…where someone outside the immediate family might hear.

"Looks really boring," was Dean's verdict as the fleet fell into orbit of Rogue's dead, dark surface. Some of the smaller ships, with no atmosphere to foul up their flight paths or force them to calculate the aerodynamics of drag and lift, dipped in closer to the planet, flying over and around it like fighter planes rather than starships designed for interstellar flight.

The planet wasn't much to look at, at least on the surface. Light-years away from any star, Rogue presented itself to human eyes in a palette of uninspiring greys and deep blacks and muddy shades of browns, even with the visibility enhanced by the starships' filters. It wasn't a particularly large world, certainly much smaller than Earth. More like Mars, if Dean had to hazard a guess, if it was a Mars long before humans had set up camp and moved in and set about changing things, and in the unappetizing brown of a cup of water that had been subjected to all the watercolor paints at once rather than the range of rust reds and oranges, ice whites, and intruding muddy blues that Mars boasted. Rogue's surface was jagged and torn, covered with sharp edges and rubble, as if it had been used as a pool ball in a minefield one too many times.

"Any clue where they're going to put that big barge down?"

Cas joined Dean where he was leaning on the window display, arm braced over his head so he could get as close to the screen as possible. The man had already refused all offers to zoom in on any particular area. They were positioned 'above' the planet, and the window showed an only slightly lit up view of the planet, an entire hemisphere of which was spread out below. Some of the barges were visible below and around them; others, including _Gabriel_, were on the other side of the planet or out of the window's field of view. Since the starship's avatar didn't need to look out the window – he was, after all, looking at it directly, on many more wavelengths than his human partner could see – Cas put his back against the window, watching Dean instead. He almost always preferred to do so. The way Dean reacted to things, the emotions that raced each other across his face, the little gestures that revealed his thoughts, all were something _Castiel_ never got tired of. The sky was his birthright, but this one human _interested_ him in a way all the stars couldn't quite live up to.

"If they can't find sufficient room, they'll make a landing site."

"Ha!" Dean looked sideways at him, grinning wryly and inviting him to share the joke. "They've been frothing at the mouth to shoot something; bet they do that and enjoy it too. They're planning on taking the place apart anyway, yeah? May as well get started."

The destruction in the offing didn't bother him. There was no life here, and life was what interested Dean, what challenged him. Rogue might have been a scientific anomaly for the way it had been thrown out of its original star system, and the way it doubtless had interacted with other astronomical bodies in the past, but the riddle of the rocks' existence and composition didn't catch his attention. As far as he was concerned, there would always be other rocks, and as long as he could get to them, he didn't particularly care what happened to this one.

"Now that looks like fun," he pointed out. Those low-flying ships had switched on some particularly powerful running lights, doubtless modified by their crews to act like the spotlights they resembled. It was quite the light show as the people manning the lights swept them back and forth across Rogue's surface as it rolled away beneath them.

_Castiel_ thought it was unnecessary, but then he didn't need the narrow wavelengths of humanly visible light to see the planet. Still, when he looked at it through human eyes, turning his head away from his human companion to look out of the window, it did look striking.

"I have no desire to play tag with mountains, Dean," he said a bit prohibitively as one of the smaller ships did just that, skimming so close to the tops of a mountain range that a moment's error by the pilot, assuming the ship was too stupid to correct in time, might have sent the entire craft careening into the unforgiving rock. Centuries of human movies, downloaded into _Castiel_'s memory over time and many of them watched at their proper speed with Dean and sometimes Sam as well, suggested that the unfortunate ship would then erupt in flames and tumble elaborately down the slope, shedding pieces of metal of various sizes as it went. More rational consideration predicted that such a collision would put a nasty dent into the ship, blow out some circuits, scare its crew, and send it wobbling back towards a safer orbital altitude at much slower speeds.

"Wasn't going to suggest it," Dean said a bit defensively, tracking the lights as they went back around the far side of the planet and disappeared. "Wouldn't have risked you, Cas. …Might have tried with _Baby_, though, if they'd thought to invite me."

The two of them watched the proceedings for a while longer as the scout ships found a location that would both accommodate the biggest barge and put the humans and their machinery close to a vein – more like a mountain full – of ore that would make their trip worthwhile, if they could only get it out. "They seem to be doing all right," the human commented. "Don't need us around, for sure."

By then he had reverted to pacing around the room restlessly, dodging the extra furniture and people he knew weren't really there, talking partly to himself, partly to Cas, who hadn't moved, and partly to his brother and _Gabriel_ on the other side of the link the two starships had set up, anticipating the inevitable request. If Dean and Sam couldn't be in the same room, they preferred to at least be able to see and hear each other. Part of the way through the trip to Rogue, some creativity with the starships' ability to project holograms of anything had resulted in a step beyond the video link the brothers usually used to talk to each other.

At the moment, about half of the furniture in this room and two of the people weren't actually there at all. Dean was seeing holographic representations of Sam and _Gabriel_'s human self, while they were seeing similar three-dimensional images of him and Cas in the room they were hanging out in to watch the mining fleet get to work. It was as close as they could come to having everyone in the same room without the inconvenient problem of finding neutral ground. The starships tended to get possessive about their humans, all the more so after they'd almost lost them, and while neither of them really believed that the other would let them come to harm, neither ship liked sending his person into the other's custody, even temporarily. So far, this was proving to be an effective compromise.

"_So, how long are we going to stick around then?"_ asked Sam, watching with amusement as his brother circled the room.

"We got 'em here," Dean pointed out. "They've got work to do. Think they'd notice if we just took off running?"

Either Sam had caved in and gotten _Gabriel_ that bag of lollipops or the starship had given up and put together some of his own, because the one he was using for punctuation was the second one in the past half hour. Dean could tell because this one was bright green and the last one had been a similarly sickening blue color. _"Notice? Well, yeah. Every ship out there has at least one sensor pointed at us, with the possible exception of the flyweights down there. What they could really do about it is something else entirely. Unless someone trigger-happy among them is plannin' on running after us, we can get a head start on them they'll never catch up with."_

"I'm all for that," muttered Dean. "Sam? You still think we should play nice? We've done what we were told to do."

"_Making a break for it…I feel like that would just confirm every bad thing they've been told about us. I talked to Devereaux some more a few days ago, and he doesn't think much of us at all. He's not __the sort of person to use the word 'flibbertigibbet', but if he ever gets that creative, it'll perfectly sum up the way he feels about you, _Gabriel_."_

"Flibbertigibbet?" said Dean and _Gabriel_ more or less simultaneously, the former in tones of absolute skepticism and the latter in delight. His older brother won out, mostly due to the fact that _Gabriel_ had started laughing instead, and continued on to say, "Sam, what have you been reading? Did Charlie replace some of your books again?"

Sam ignored the question – and the laughter – and kept thinking aloud. _"If we can get _sent_ away, then yes, let's go and take our time about going back to Shadow. Were we ever told to go back to Shadow once this lot got here safely?" _

He'd addressed this last to _Gabriel_, who stopped laughing, thought it over for no seconds flat, and replied, _"Nope. Seems to have slipped Ellen's mind. I'm liking that woman more and more."_

"_She's good people,"_ Sam agreed with him. _"Any suggestions? Not from you,_ Gabriel."

_Gabriel_ slumped all the way onto the floor, lollipop in tow, to express how disappointed he was with that ban as dramatically as possible. Sam ignored him.

"Oh, I think we can make ourselves surplus to requirements," said Dean confidently. "May as well start with asking nicely."

"And then?" Cas wanted to know from his vantage point at the window display.

"We ask less nicely."

* * *

They asked nicely. They got told no, for what the four of them thought were very bad reasons.

"You've got somewhere else to be?" Devereaux asked rhetorically when they appealed to him. Sucking up to this guy, as Dean chose to phrase his thoughts after that conversation, was getting very old very fast.

"He's not our boss! We shouldn't be asking for permission from him, Sam. We're now even more useless than we were on Shadow, and I'm running very low on patience these days."

"Calm down, Dean," Sam snapped at him. They were standing in another corridor aboard _Maze Runner_, having come down in person to the newly grounded, massive combined processing plant and ship to present their case and, or so they'd hoped, make their goodbyes. A couple of the other ships had also landed, and a number of teams made up of delegations from each ship were setting up airtight connections between them. The entire complex was beginning to look like concepts of asteroid-based space stations from pulp science fiction written and illustrated in the very dawn of the space age. Except this setup had fewer bright colors – illumination did not improve Rogue to any significant degree – and more space suits that actually worked, and no exaggerated women in impractical clothing being rescued or abducted by monsters, either.

"I don't get it, though. He obviously doesn't want us here all that much. They've got this ship down, and between its size and the air patrol it's tough and protected." Sam made as if to kick at the deck plating in illustration, remembered just in time that Rogue had just about the gravity of Mars to match its mass and that the barge's artificial gravity had been switched off to help with the movement and transportation of large quantities of ore, and thought better of abrupt movements without a solid handhold on something to keep him in place. Sometimes he would have been a little happier if Newton had stopped at two laws. Not often – it was an important thing, the equal and opposite reaction, and it made many good things possible – but sometimes.

"He's probably just busy and forgot for the moment that we don't actually answer to him." The people buzzing back and forth through the corridors backed that up as a possibility. Still, the fact that many of those people were slowing down ever so slightly to stare out of the corners of their eyes and, now and again, move towards the opposite bulkhead as they passed the brothers wasn't improving their mood much. It only served to reinforce that they were neither needed nor wanted here. Standing close enough to touch, Sam's reluctance to be stared at and desire to get away to a place where no one looked at him like that was communicated to his brother as clearly as Dean's frustration and defensiveness, about to boil over into anger and possibly physical violence, was transmitted back to him.

"We should get out of here."

Sam glanced over at him briefly, just to check that he meant the _Maze Runner_ and not the star system, at least right at this moment. He did. For now.

"So how do we convince him?" Dean asked. "Think of something, quick, because either I'm going to start shouting or me and Cas are just going to take off running anyway."

His brother grinned. "I believe you." He thought for a few seconds as they walked, determinedly ignoring the people who moved aside ahead of them. He knew better than to think it was politeness. "They want us here 'just in case' something tries to attack them, right? We're not here because we're needed to do any of this. I mean, you and I can scope out bits of a planet's geology, but we don't give a damn how much money it'll make some corporate zombie wherever they're camped out."

"Point, Sam."

"What if we gave them a way to contact us, 'just in case'? We're still packing the beacons that'll put them back in regular contact with the rest of the network. If we set up one of those and maybe match it with another one from our stores, it'd be like an emergency contact. As long as we make it clear that they're not to use it for anything but a screaming invasion of giant spiders from outer space or something equally unlikely, I bet you they never call and we can go where we want for a while until Ellen – or someone who likes us a lot less – realizes we're in the wind."

Dean stopped as he thought it over, pointedly unconcerned by the three members of the _Maze Runner_'s crew trying to edge around him with a large and complex piece of machinery on antigravs that looked somewhat less maneuverable than the _Maze Runner_ itself. His brother watched with amusement as they went through a complex nonverbal debate about whether to try to get past in a space much too small for the machine or risk annoying a man who still looked like he was looking for someone to punch. (Sam knew better; by now this was Dean's _irritated but thinking and not violent_ expression, or one of them, at least. But the three crewmembers didn't know that.)

"Yeah, I can live with that, if Cas and _Gabriel_ agree. And only," he agreed after a moment, stepping aside and letting the floating machine and its attendants through, "if they don't ever, ever call us except for the giant spiders."

And if one of the machine's attendants overheard and threw a wide-eyed and obviously confused glance over his shoulder as the entire contraption got further away, that was just a bonus. What was the point in babysitting if you didn't get to scare the crap out of some kids from time to time?

* * *

Devereaux didn't like it, but by that point he wasn't being given a choice. The Winchesters had just about run out of their tolerance for being told what to do by people they didn't respect, and clearly intended to leave whether the fleet's commodore liked it or not.

Programming and launching the relay beacon that would put this planet and its new inhabitants in touch with the growing network was the work of a few minutes on the ships' part, and most of that was consumed with getting the small device deployed. It was easy enough for the ships to design Rogue's transmitter to link directly to an identical model aboard _Castiel_ as its first point of call. The miners could still use it to talk to the rest of the universe, but in the case of an emergency – "And only an emergency, mind," Sam reiterated, none too patiently at that point, "not that there's a short in one of your food replicators, or something" – it would call _Castiel_ first. The connection wouldn't be quite as instantaneous as the ansible technology that linked ship mind to human clone, which was expensive and complex technology and beyond their skill to build and troubleshoot this far out from the resources and experts of Launch Station, but the message would get there.

They would have to drop out of flight to receive it – beacons worked differently than ships; it was complicated but it was, the ships assured the few who asked, science – but somehow no one made a point of telling Devereaux – or anyone – about that little detail. They could transmit messages within universes, not between them.

They were only slightly inconvenienced by the fact that Devereaux tried to insist on establishing the beacon close to the surface of Rogue, in the _Maze Runner_'s cargo bay in fact, rather than in orbit where it would usually be positioned. It was that condition that ended up consuming most of the time between getting agreement from him and having the freedom to go their own way, because there wasn't actually the space in the cargo bay that he thought there was and they all had to wait while his crew cleared materials and equipment in large containers and lying loose out of the way. The relay beacons were bigger than most people thought they were, as they were usually only seen in the vacuum of space and compared with much bigger objects like starships, planets, and stars.

With that eventually done, they made their goodbyes and left Rogue in their wake.

"Where to?" _Castiel_ asked his human partner, who had come to retrieve Cas from the room Dean called the Control Room, "or shall I just pick a direction and go that way?"

Dean laughed more out of relief than amusement. "I'm sure there's somewhere we'd rather be than an empty spot in the black, unless that's where you really want to be." Once Cas had denied that possibility, the human called out, "Hey, Sam, remember that planet with nothing but little islands, years back?"

"_I do remember."_ While they had jumped into flight and gotten away before Devereaux or anyone in that fleet could think of new reasons to call them back, a conference with the _Kitsune_'s medic had given _Gabriel_ a new painkiller drug to try out on Sam that they'd developed recently on the medic's home planet and the starship hadn't heard about yet, although he'd spent part of the trip taking the formula apart molecule by molecule and running simulations.

So far it seemed to be working, although they were still finding out about the side effects, namely an intense sensitivity to light. As a result, Sam was still not entirely functional for a while after transitioning to flight, but he was conscious, which was an improvement. Although this link was audio only, Dean rather suspected his little brother was sprawled out in bed with all the lights off. He could guess things like that.

"_There were about three little islands, if I remember correctly, and after the five hours it took to look at those, we spent the entire week in _Baby_. Underwater. Place has some damn ugly fish. I said I didn't think you'd be willing to turn your shuttlecraft into a submarine, and you set out to prove me wrong."_

"That's the one."

"They're still calling it Shatterglass. _Joshua_ was going to send some of his sea mammals out there," _Castiel_ recalled. The brothers, like almost all of the Fleet's trailblazers, gave planets names whimsically and openhandedly. There were just so many of them, whether they were inhabitable or not, all of them needing names somewhat more memorable than a string of numbers and letters, and once the sentient starships had staked a claim on Earth mythology human explorers had been forced to get a lot more creative.

Some of the names were kept as more people visited and talked about the place; others were quickly replaced as needed. Shatterglass had been named for the appearance of its endless ocean in the sunlight that had been almost too bright for human eyes and had actually gotten Dean to suspend his long-held ban on sunglasses.

Dean remembered those – the animals, not the sunglasses. They had smelled like fish and smiled incessantly and had been both soft to the touch and surprisingly willing to be touched. "The ones he was trying to teach to talk?" The…dolphins, that was the word he'd been looking for…hadn't talked the last time he'd heard anything about it, just made high-pitched noises and clicks to each other. Not an unpleasant vocabulary, but not a particularly comprehensible one either.

"We should go find out if that ever worked," he declared.

A silence from the other end of the line, and then Sam's voice all but lit up with enthusiasm. _"We should absolutely go back to Shatterglass. Then I can throw _Gabriel_ in the water again."_

"_Wait a second, what? No, no, no! Absolutely not!" Gabriel_ objected to this while both Winchesters laughed at the memory – one of the incidents that _Gabriel_ had always pointed to as illustrating the dangers of actually inhabiting a touchable human form, although, to be fair, he'd soundly deserved the dunking he'd gotten – and Cas smiled because his friends were happy. _"I mean, we can go to Shatterglass, sure, why not? But you don't get to do that again!"_

"_I'll make it fair this time,"_ Sam promised him whimsically, and entirely insincerely, and everyone in earshot knew it. _"You're stronger than me, but I'm bigger than you. And this time you know what I'm trying."_

"Shatterglass, then?" Dean interrupted before the negotiations could get too convoluted. "Good."

Some instinct rather than any appreciable sensation told Dean that his starship was changing course, no doubt reorienting from the aimless trip to nowhere they'd started on and heading towards distant Shatterglass instead. _Castiel_ wasn't clumsy enough to let him actually feel it, but they were so in tune that the man could imagine it readily. Something about the background hum of the ship's faster-than-light engines, a sound as constant and reassuring as a heartbeat, told him almost everything he needed to know as the ship took his bearings, turned in coordination with his older brother, and picked up speed for the joy of it.

The time passed agreeably for several hours after that, and it was only some insistent sense of honor and obligation that made Dean say, "I suppose we should check and make sure they haven't exploded," with _they_ obviously being the mining expedition.

"Must we?" Cas protested halfheartedly; he had not liked the way his human friends had been treated by some of the expedition members. That the vast majority of the people included in that expedition had never so much as spoken to Dean or Sam was a fact he was choosing to ignore, for the moment. He also didn't like that they were being sent to specific places and only those places. The starship had discovered that he much preferred the open-ended nature of their former trailblazing mission, where they were given a direction rather than a destination and not expected back for months.

It was alright when the four of them chose their own destinations, but not when they were chosen for them by others.

"Look on the bright side, Cas," Dean told him, tongue firmly in cheek, "they _might_ have exploded."

Cas stared at him for a minute, baffled, while the ship tried to figure out whether this was meant to be a good thing or a bad one. Dean maintained a straight face through long practice and enjoyed watching him work over the problem.

"I'll check," the starship agreed at last, and put actions to words immediately.

Reverting to cruising speeds never had the impact that taking off into flight did, and Dean's only clue that they had returned to the normal universe where light ran at light speed was the minor change in sound from the ship's engine.

And that Cas froze, eyes fixed on something not in the room, listening to something not audible to human ears.

"Cas, what?"

"We're going back," the man who was the ship told him, in a voice almost a growl, "we're going back right now." Before Dean could ask for an explanation, flight smacked him in the chest and they were away again, probably catching up with _Gabriel_.

"Why?" Dean demanded. He gave into the impulse to catch hold of his companion by the collar of his shirt and pull him around so that they were eye to eye. "What's going on? What did you hear?"

"This."

The signal that _Castiel_ had received came on, slowed down to the human speeds it had been recorded at.

He'd joked that they might have exploded; he'd been more right than he knew. It was not a good sound he could hear in that message, clearly a distress call if the sounds of failing systems and tearing metal, fire and interference were any indication.

And, of course, the hoarse shout, nearer a scream, over the noise of _"— all gods' sake, get back here, they were waiting for–"_ that ended abruptly in a rush of deafening static was a clue.

"They were jammed," Cas said briefly. "_Gabriel_ recognizes the technique. It was used on him. Six months ago. It's them, Dean. _Samael_'s fleet. They're back."

* * *

"Storm lords. Is there anyone left?"

It was a fair question for Dean to ask, hushed and horrified. That he hadn't liked most of the people aboard those ships didn't matter. It could as easily have been his body, or his brother's, floating in that void; could have been the ships that were his lover and his friend in battered pieces. The smaller ships that had grounded themselves on Rogue's surface had been shattered, torn apart and spread across that surface in a splatter pattern of burnt and broken destruction. The enormous, central _Maze Runner_ was gone completely – too completely, part of him noticed, and pushed aside to deal with later. If the debris in orbit, falling around and towards the dead little world, was any indication, at least some of the other ships had met the same fate.

Sympathy and regret – and _guilt_ – tore into him. _If we had stayed just a little longer…this didn't need to happen!_

Wrecked and adrift, some of the hulks had been burned straight through, while others looked as if they had been shaken apart, so widely were their pieces scattered as they tumbled away from each other. Where atmosphere still leaked from no longer intact hulls, fires burnt sluggishly, a race between the fire and the void to consume the oxygen. Every so often, even as they approached in a horrified, cautious advance, some new compartment was breached, sending a jet of burning air into the vacuum of space, lighting up the destruction for brief moments.

There was a reason ships controlled by humans didn't have a chance against armed versions of the sentient starships, even and especially insane ones. They moved too fast, thought too quickly, reacted instantaneously, communicated and coordinated far quicker than any human mind could organize a defense, much less put it into practice. The only force that could oppose one of them was one of their siblings.

And they had left, desperate to be anywhere else. Deep inside, in the monster biting at his gut and spitting poison into his throat, Dean knew he would be living with the view of this sorry excuse for a battlefield…this massacre…for a long time to come.

"Any survivors?"

"Yes." And the single word in _Castiel_'s voice, despite the way he said it that suggested Dean wasn't the only one taking the blame for this on himself, was a relief. "We can see human life signs. Some on the surface, some in orbit. We don't know how many yet, but we'll find them."

Someone who didn't know him the way Dean did would have heard nothing in _Castiel_'s voice as he searched, apparently all business. Dean, who could read his real feelings even out of his silences, could hear the anger at the broken ships that had done this and the fear for the lives of whatever humans might be left, just on the surface. There were other things mixed in the simple phrases and controlled tone, as well, underneath: hate, fear for their family, disgust, and sympathy were just a few of them.

But if there were survivors… Dean believed in never giving up. As long as they could salvage _something_, someone, then maybe he wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night, nearly frozen and unable to move, clumsy and desperate with the remnants of nightmare, seeing tiny flecks that resolved themselves against his will into human bodies, contrasted against the dismal bulk of Rogue by the spitting flares from violated ships.

"I'm bringing them aboard. The cargo bay you were keeping the spare parts for your _Baby_ in will serve. Dean, they've been in near-vacuum, there are medical supplies in the sickbay and I need you to run triage–"

"On it, Cas." He took off running, calling over his shoulder, desperate to make this disaster just a little bit less worse, because he couldn't help feeling that this was on _him_. "Just get them somewhere there's air, I'll do the rest. Hell of a rescue run this turned out to be…"

* * *

_to be continued_


	6. 99 Problems

**Chapter Six: 99 Problems**

**Author's Note:** This chapter officially put me over the 50,000 NaNoWriMo word count on , Archive of Our Own, and Microsoft Word's word counter on November 19, 2013. They all count words just a little bit differently. But it was definitely ahead of the deadline!

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_Then: Shadow_

When the Winchesters resumed their hunt at first light, they did so with a new sense of urgency. Before, they'd been content to make their way across Shadow's surface aimlessly, with a goal and a target but no particular haste to find it.

Now they were watching their backs, with the added risk of keeping an eye out for something apparently only human eyes could see. They trusted their abilities and experience, but it was an extra layer of danger on top of all the other problems a planet full of unknowns could throw at them. Accordingly, they'd come prepared.

"You all right?" Dean asked his brother as they checked their weapons one more time in the early dawn. The colder temperatures of the night were still lingering, and the moisture that had accumulated on the overhanging trees was dripping down almost as readily as it was burning off, creating a heavy mist that, in colder weather, would probably turn into a nasty and impenetrable fog.

Sam nodded, expressionless as he fiddled with the hand scanner he was wielding as if hoping to get it to give up some of the information it hadn't gathered last night on their mysterious shadowy visitor.

"Because you don't look so good, Sam, what's up?"

He suspected he looked tired, and that was what his sometimes overprotective older brother was seeing. Trained to be a good soldier and used to jumping 'time zones' rapidly, he'd slept when sleeping was possible, just in case he didn't have time later. But sleep had been slow in coming in the wake of the adrenaline of their ambiguous firefight with one of the shadows that gave Shadow its name, and it had proved fugitive when he'd finally subsided into its shallows.

The image of the whirling, lightless smoke of the shadow creature had wedged itself into some corner of his mind, and he'd stumbled through nightmare after nightmare, resurfacing into rooms that should have been familiar and safe and home, but had been discolored by darkness and the sweat of fear. Which was ridiculous, he'd made an effort to tell himself, as he'd tried to get back to sleep for the second time, kicking restlessly at his blankets as if they were to blame.

Although what part the blankets could have played in visions of shelves full of dead and stuffed animals, many of kinds he didn't recognize in the dream, with eyes stitched or gummed closed by blood and tears and lips dried and desiccated away from their teeth and dry white gums as they talked to him in unnatural and terrible voices, chattering and croaking over and around each other, he didn't know. He'd dreamed that he'd been running through a library he'd never seen before but had known intimately and had known that it was wrong, that someone had changed it while he had been away.

Likewise, a dark and overbearing someone he didn't know when he woke up but had recognized in the dream had pursued him through the building's – or was it a body's? – byways and rooms, not in the manner of an enemy hunting him but like a critical companion he couldn't get rid of, delivering unintelligible but ominous and disappointed pronouncements that always lost their meaning before they reached Sam's ears. When he'd finally escaped the dark man, the collection of badly preserved animals had berated and accused him, making threats that had chilled him to the bone but had vanished from his memory when he woke up, reaching out in terror for something, anything real.

He'd found his anchor in a warm grip that caught his clumsily groping hand. Still blind from sleep, Sam had done the first thing that had seemed right, which had been to pull _Gabriel_ down to his level and deliberately run his free hand across the man's eyes and mouth just to establish that he wasn't still in that room and his companion was alive. The unfamiliar flutter of eyelashes against his fingers had brought him back to reality. The tentative kiss, still almost a nip, pressed to his fingertips in passing had done the rest.

When his vision sorted itself out and Sam was once again aware of his surroundings, including the little strawberry blond man staring at him anxiously, he'd snapped his hands back, letting go of the hand he'd still been holding and hissing a curse. There was still a little bit of light in his rooms even though he'd been asleep, just enough to let him see. He'd never have admitted it, but after the endless dark of the Beneath he wasn't comfortable if he was alone and couldn't see. It wasn't rational – he'd spent almost all of his time there in the normal ambient light his starship maintained, and he'd been able to see – but he was dealing with it.

"Sorry, _Gabriel_, sorry," he'd growled. Shifting so that he could prop himself up on one elbow and face his companion – storm lords, he was stiff! What had his body been doing while his mind had been dreaming, tensing every muscle and holding them there the whole time? – he'd tried to explain, "Just a nightmare. Didn't mean to grab you."

_Gabriel_ hadn't seemed particularly bothered. Sam had pushed him away, but he shifted slightly as if he wanted to come back in closer but hadn't worked up the courage or the decision to do so yet. He was getting better at physical contact, but somehow Sam doubted he would ever be the type to curl up close and stay there. "Thought so. You were all over the place, up here." What had maybe started as an impudent tap on Sam's forehead turned into something that was almost a caress as _Gabriel_ brushed Sam's long hair away from his face. Belatedly, Sam reached up to swipe it away from his eyes but didn't get that far – _Gabriel_ swatted his hand away and continued with what he was doing, methodically, possibly because Sam didn't want to meet his eyes.

"Tell me about it?"

Sam huffed at him, and caught the twitch the gesture evoked from his companion as his breath brushed against the bare skin of the man's wrist. "You don't have nightmares. Why would you want to hear about one of mine?"

"I get nightmares, Sammy. I don't sleep, but I imagine things I don't want to ever happen, usually when I don't want to be imagining them."

Part of him wanted to go back to sleep; the majority still believed, however irrationally, that the animals – had they been toys? – with no eyes and no lips would still be there, waiting to talk to him. Sam didn't want to go back there. "I didn't know that."

"Sure. You're the one always saying I have an overactive imagination."

This time the huff of breath was closer to a laugh than it had been. "_Everyone_ says that. Not just me. It's a dull, dull week when you can't get someone new to say that, right?"

"Well…maybe. So are you going to tell me? Or I can go, if you want." This last was added in a slightly pitiful tone that Sam didn't think was an act. There was always just the hint of laughter in _Gabriel_'s voice when he was acting; Sam had learned to hear it the same way that he knew Dean had learned to read meaning from _Castiel_'s silences. Unless the starship had gotten a lot better at disguising his thoughts in the past five hours, a glance at the clock set to ships' time confirmed, he meant it. He didn't want to go.

And frankly, Sam would rather have the company. He'd grown up almost constantly hand-in-hand with his brother; his entire childhood he'd fallen asleep with the sound of Dean's steady breathing as he slept somewhere close by. No, the company was welcome. Deliberately, he reclined back onto the complex nest of pillows he'd built up despite the fact that _Gabriel_ was always rearranging them just to mess with him and reached out, invitingly, offering the proximity if it was wanted but getting comfortable if it wasn't. "It's okay," he allowed.

He wasn't quite sure he'd actually heard _Gabriel_ say, "Oh, _good_," but he suspected he had, even though his companion stayed where he was for the moment, placing Sam in the unusual situation of having to look up at his much shorter friend. He knew the body was a front, and really _Gabriel_ was not even on a human scale, but that was hard to remember sometimes. Still, a bare palm pressed against his chest, skin to skin but almost clinical, and Sam became aware of the fact that he was still breathing far too quickly as the adrenaline and fear of the dream ebbed away slower than either ship or man would have liked.

Sam made a point of slowing down his breathing, counting steadily and matching breath to count. When he no longer felt as if he'd been running for real, instead of through an imaginary library that existed only in his head, he told _Gabriel_ what he could remember about the dream. With his closest friend outside of his brother hovering over him protectively, part of it had ebbed away already, vanishing wherever bad and good dreams equally go.

"What do you have nightmares about?" he asked cautiously, the simple act of describing the illogic of the dream bleeding it of most of its horror.

_Gabriel_ was silent for a long time, and for a while Sam thought he would go back to sleep before the starship answered, if he even intended to. "_Samael_," he said finally, and the name jolted Sam back to wakefulness immediately, but temporarily. "The things he meant to do to you. Being lost, in that place. Being alone."

"Does not happen," Sam promised him, and went back to sleep.

He'd almost woken up once more, out of an inexplicable but urgent sense that he was supposed to be awake and be somewhere, that he was late for something he'd been expected for and that he had failed to live up to expectations, that he had overslept for – nothing, and the fact that at some point _Gabriel_ had taken him up on his unspoken invitation and had been dozing against his shoulder by then assured him that if he had been needed for something, his friend would have let him know. In, doubtless, some obnoxiously over-elaborate way.

Now, down on Shadow with the sun coming up and burning off the dew and a predator to hunt, with his brother looking like he'd rolled out of bed after two weeks' sleep, a brisk jog, a hot shower in more ways than one, and a frankly unhealthy breakfast, Sam didn't want to discuss it. "Didn't sleep well," he said shortly. "I'll be fine. Can we go?"

Dean knew enough not to argue with that tone in his brother's voice unless he was really desperate for a fight. They went.

Yesterday they had wandered; today they patrolled, keeping the chatter between themselves and the ships in orbit to a minimum and limited to the information they needed to assess their environment and hunt a predator. And today, they watched every shadow just in case one of them moved on their own, a never-ending task in a forest where every tree and stone and hillock cast a shadow that moved every time something else did.

Realizing that the animals in these foothills wouldn't have any reason to fear humans yet, but would probably have experience with the predator they were pursuing, Dean and Sam chased silences, looking for an area where Shadow's variations on the bird went mute and the small creatures that moved around them fell still.

"It's a traveler," Sam concluded after a few hours of this, keeping a careful eye on his hand scanner. "And there can't be many of it, or we would have seen others. Or this would have," to the accompaniment of a futile but satisfying shaking of the device.

This was enough information to Dean to conclude, gruffly, "So, a large predator, then. Awesome."

"I still think it's probably nocturnal and we missed it last night. Not –" he held up a hand preemptively, a futile gesture as the people most likely to object to that statement were still in orbit, "that I wanted to be anywhere near that shadow thing. But we're not going to find something that hunts at night by wandering around in the day."

Dean disagreed. "We'll pick up its trail. The scanners can see it. We just need to cross somewhere it's been recently. Or I'd settle for one of its cousins. As long as Doc Mosley can match up the type of animal from the claws, and someone figures out what it's allergic to, we don't have to get the exact same one."

Sam had heard his brother, but he was still thinking along the same lines he had been before. "Instead of wandering around at random, let's look for somewhere a big predator could have holed up. Caves, tunnels, overhangs, something. Maybe we'll catch it sleeping and _Gabriel_ and Cas can drop us and it back at base. In a convenient cage, of course. And it, not us." It paid to be specific, given a starship prone to creative misinterpretation, purely for the fun of the preferably outraged results.

"Works for me."

With the help of the starships watching over them from orbit, they scouted the area in an increasingly large concentric spiral, working with the limits of their hand scanners to cover as much area as possible without backtracking. It was a strategy that would have had most people very lost in a very short span of time, with the constant changes of direction, the challenges of the unfamiliar terrain, and the light constantly shifting as time passed through Shadow's morning and into its afternoon.

But the ships kept them on course, and the two human brothers had always thrived on a challenge. Sam liked to run as long as there wasn't something chasing him, although that had its thrills in its own right, and he was perfectly amenable to a cross-country hike as an alternate means of exercise. It was real, in a way that was reassuring after the nightmares he'd been having even before last night, and in a way that sometimes his life traveling between stars as the companion of a living faster-than-light starship didn't compare to.

Not much came more real, more physical and natural and true, than getting as much ground as possible under his feet, his brother at his side and an enemy they could fight, even if it was only an animal, somewhere nearby.

He could use a little more of that. Maybe Shadow, once they'd gotten a handle on the more aggressive fauna, could be the retreat from the madness they needed. Maybe it would be interesting. They'd only been here a couple of weeks, which was only a little longer than one of their whistle stop planet-scouting visits, and now there was this, despite the fact that nothing had happened to interrupt their walk in the woods. And those woods were, Sam noted in passing just in case he needed to retrace his route or take advantage of his environment, as he'd been trained to do all his life, gradually thinning out in the underbrush but darkening overhead. The trees they were skirting were shading into new configurations and types. The forest floor might be clearer than the low-growing smaller plants they'd been wading through not long ago and the vines a few miles back that had knotted the entire area into an impenetrable cats-cradle. (Some of those vines had moved, against the wind and worryingly in the brothers' direction. They'd backtracked and gone around.) But the taller trees were beginning to loom, heavier canopies mostly blocking the sun.

"Are we going the right way?" he asked quietly, and he wasn't sure if he was keeping his voice down because of the potential for disturbing something predatory, or out of some instinctive reaction to the environment. When Shadow's bright sun managed to cut through the cover overhead, in subtly wrong shades of green and the blue undercoat that a few members of the Shadow survey team had been nattering about at dinner a week or so ago, it cast down distinct puddles of light like spotlights.

"_You're getting closer to the mountains on this pass, just skirting the edge,"_ said _Gabriel_'s voice in his ear.

"Wondered when we'd hit those." Dean must have heard _Gabriel_'s comment as well. "If we're looking for caves, shouldn't we be heading that way? I'm getting dizzy."

Experience told Sam his brother was just complaining because he was on edge, and anyway, he was clearly exaggerating. Although he wouldn't say as much unless he was looking for trouble, he knew that Dean had learned some of their father's paranoia a little too well. Most people let down their guard after nothing threatened them for an extended length of time; they habituated to the absence of any threat and learned to feel safe. From Dean's point of view, the longer trouble held off, the more likely it was to come calling in the near future.

Dean called it _waiting for the other shoe_. There was always, he insisted, another shoe, and the longer it took to drop, the more likely it was to be a steel-toed boot. Or dropped from a much higher point, and therefore about to hit harder and more painfully. Dean's metaphors could sometimes use some work.

A few years ago, Sam had weathered a bad, bad period that he'd almost have called a panic attack or a breakdown, if it had been anyone else. It hadn't been his – he would been quite content with his life if he'd been able to figure out how to persuade _Gabriel_, who had the entire recorded history of human music at his disposal, to stop trying to develop a soundtrack to both their lives, often at the same time – but Dean had realized, really and truly for the first time, how happy he was with Cas. He hadn't been ready to accept that, and the two of them, the man and the ship, had almost torn each other apart in confusion and fear.

Sam had listened, sympathized, tried to argue, listened some more, tuned out the more nonsensical comments, gotten angry at the stupidity of what Dean had been saying, and ultimately had hauled off and slapped his brother a good one for being an idiot. And had said so, too, into the resultant shocked silence.

If the previous deluge of _too-good-to-be-true_ paranoia hadn't convinced him that something was seriously wrong and that Dean was ultimately more sane and stable with Cas by his side, the fact that Dean hadn't even tried to hit him back – had stumbled back all the way into the wall as if he would have fallen over without it and just _gaped_ at him – would have confirmed it.

He'd said some harsh but necessary things and insisted that Dean square things with Cas, or else.

As far as he knew, the two of them had been good since then.

Still, Dean was more often than not right about the other shoe.

"I'm bored of circles," Dean was still telling the ships and Sam equally, trying to shift his attention around their immediate area and mentally filling in the people who weren't visible. Sam could see him doing it. "Hunting and tracking aren't methodical like this. It's all instinct and reaction and impulsive. Mountains seem right to me. This thing's a climber. Tossed Max off an edge on purpose, didn't it? It follows its prey up rock falls, or was up there to begin with; it knows heights."

Sam was not particularly surprised to hear _Castiel_ say, _"You know what you're doing, Dean, as you have insisted on telling me multiple times."_

"Right. C'mon, Sammy; let's go climbing." Not waiting to see if Sam was following him, Dean broke off from their roundabout path to head for a gap in the tree line that, they discovered, led to…more trees. But the scanners said they were gaining altitude, even though the forest that blanketed the base of the mountain range – still nameless, unless the cartographers had moved past the loss of Max and gotten around to naming them since – made any sort of view associated with the greater height impossible.

About an hour later, that other shoe came in for a landing, and it was indeed a steel-toed boot.

Sam first knew about it when his brother put out a hand for him to stop, stepping closer to him protectively so that a gesture that could have been an outstretched hand turned into an arm across his chest. A glance warned him to stay quiet, and he obeyed without question, at first. When he asked, he did so through eye contact alone. _What?_

Beside him, Dean was braced for combat, feet shifting to lower his center of gravity against an attack or the recoil of a gun. He was scanning their surroundings, tracking something he couldn't pin down just yet, but he was trying, tiny movements telling his brother that he'd heard something. _Hear that?_ Dean asked him silently.

…Or an _absence_ of something. The mountain forest had become very quiet, something Sam noticed only a heartbeat before the scanner, which he'd meant to stow away only briefly while they scrambled over a sudden gap between one piece of mountain and another, which wouldn't have been so bad except for the unidentifiable animal that had died at the bottom of it and hadn't been eaten enough to not stink, began to make its _alarm_ sound from the muffled depths of his jacket.

The overwhelming smell from the dead animal must have masked the chemical trace the scanners had been looking for so patiently, he'd conclude later. At the moment, he'd save questions about how it had snuck up on them – and the watching starships, and that was odd – for later.

_Split up?_ Sam asked, glancing from side to side and back at Dean interrogatively.

_No,_ his brother decided, pivoting instead to put Sam behind him so they could watch as much of the forest as possible. Just before he did so, Sam caught sight of one of Dean's hands brushing across his other forearm, which didn't make any sense until he figured out that Dean had just written _Shhh_ onto the sensor-rich fabric of the smartsuit, which _Castiel_ was monitoring. They didn't know how good this thing's hearing was and the last thing they needed was a signal from the starship alerting it to their presence.

To that end, Sam cut off the sound from the scanner, leaving it to blink out its message in silence. It had the trace now, and was tracking something that scanned almost exactly like the thing that had killed Max – to Sam's left.

He nudged his shoulder against Dean's, the two of them communicating fluently despite the silence so complete they could hear their own steady breathing. Hand signals told Dean, who was the better shot and who already had a sighted directed-energy weapon out and primed and a handgun halfway out of its holster, where to aim and how far away it was.

And it was coming closer to them, deliberately. Did it recognize human scent as something vulnerable and mortal? The scanner couldn't tell if it was the same one – it hadn't gotten a good enough reading originally. There hadn't been enough left and the trail had been just a little too old.

Sam had been counting down distance in his brother's peripheral vision, but that all changed when the signal he was watching on the scanner accelerated towards them.

"Coming up fast!" he snapped out, breaking the silence – either it knew they were there or it was going on the most coincidental run of its life. Both ways, this was only going to end with something dead, and it wasn't going to be the Winchesters.

Dean reported, quite calmly, "I see it," and fired. The beam burned through the bits of forest unlucky enough to be on the slope in between Dean and his target, easily piercing the blue-green Shadow flora.

Directly ahead of them, something that sounded large made a sound unlike anything Sam had ever heard before, a low clicking like thousands of armored bugs flying around and into each other superimposed over a screech like claws cutting through glass. It was not a happy sound, and that was perhaps the only thing familiar about it.

"Tough guy," Dean observed, almost casually. He flicked the beam off, dropped the weapon at his feet, and went for the handgun. He usually preferred it anyway. It was solid and reliable and didn't short out at odd moments. (No matter that he'd spilled coffee that hadn't been doing him any good at that point over the guts of the energy weapon that he'd taken apart and made the mistake of trying to use later.) He liked the handgun.

He had it ready and aimed a full second and a half before something grey and shifting and four or five times his size and more than that in weight barreled down that slope directly at him, making that noise.

It never got there, legs collapsing beneath it as three bullets smashed through its skull and another four went into the wall of flesh and shifting surface directly below. And by that time, both brothers had moved, instinctively in opposite directions but away from the business end of the gun so that it would have to pick a target and the other could protect the one it went for.

"Shit," was Dean's verdict as the echoes stopped rolling off the mountains. "It's big."

"You noticed?"

"Shut up." He resisted the urge to crouch down next to it and look it over close up. "It's toast?"

Sam waved the scanner at the corpse. "This says yes. But there's barely enough of the head left for the xenobios to look at its brain. So you may as well make sure, if it'll make you happy."

"Not having those claws coming at me will make me happy. And that's assuming it keeps its brain in its head." Still, he emptied the clip into the shattered skull. "And now it's uglier."

And very dead. And Sam wouldn't have considered it a model of beauty before his brother had gotten at it. The burnt hole in its center of mass was the result of the energy weapon – Dean had quite sensibly aimed for the center and worried about the bits that stuck out later. The effects of that had cauterized the wound to some degree but it was going to stink even more than that thing in the crevasse later. Now that he could get a good look at it, the grey wasn't fur as much as strands like thousands of tiny fingers. Some of them were still twitching as the creature's nervous system fired off redundant sparks of electricity. He was willing to bet that they'd worked like a cross between a cat's whiskers and a jellyfish's tendrils, and decided not to touch in case they were similarly poisonous.

It had come at them on all fours for speed, but something about its spine suggested that it could walk erect if it wanted to. It might not be particularly maneuverable, but its evolutionary future – or past – might contain a proper biped. If it did, it would be a giant, at least compared to humans. What was left of the head was best described as _fangs_. There were a lot of them, and unlike the neat parallel lines that Earth's land animals had evolved, these stuck inward in all directions, a rough circle of certain pain and probable death. Or at least, it had been – the gun had put paid to that. The rest of its face was gone. Most of it had probably been teeth anyway, without leaving much room for brain. Big, fanged, _dumb_ biped, then, with 'eyes' all over its body. Sam didn't want to be here for that in some couple million years.

Just to make things more interesting, Sam's imagination and scientific mind presented him with an image of this creature coming towards him, mouth gaping wide – his imagination gave it a throat like a snake's capable of expanding to shove its prey whole into that wood chipper of a mouth – and resolved not to run into any more of these things without a reliable weapon.

"Hey, I've heard these things described before," Dean said. "Back at base they were calling something a lot like this a troll."

"Close enough to one; bet the name doesn't survive having a body to study. But look at this," Sam said instead, attention caught by the front paws. But that was the thing – they weren't paws, with the clumsiness that implied. They were almost hands, with flexible and heavily armed digits that, when he reached out to experiment, proved to be double-jointed. They folded backwards against the back of the hand as well as against the padded palm. So did the opposable thumb. It had been able to run at them on those paws, but they were capable of much more.

It was clearly an apex predator. Suddenly the word 'monster', which they'd been using casually as a catchall term for something unfamiliar and dangerous, seemed very accurate.

While that was interesting, that wasn't what had drawn Sam's eye. Some of the claws that tipped those fingers were chipped and broken.

"Huh," said Dean, catching the implications immediately. "You think it's the same one that left fingernail clippings in Max?"

"Might be. What are the odds of that?"

"Good enough, looks like. And if this is our killer, and we tracked it all the way back here, bet there aren't very many. Case closed. Let's haul it back and have Doc Mosley whip up some Troll-B-Gone spray."

"Good," Sam said, and meant it wholeheartedly.

"Although, one big question."

Sam raised an eyebrow at him.

"Cas? _Gabriel_? Want to explain where you and your sensors were during all this?"

There was enough of a silence from their communicators that Sam was worried for a moment, before _Castiel_ spoke up.

"_You keep saying you know what you're doing,"_ _Castiel_ said, which was obviously meant to sound quite reasonable. _"I would have told you if it began to approach you, but you sensed it before it sensed you."_

"So you saw it before we did?" Sam protested. "And you let it sneak up on us? What the hell?"

"Cas," said Dean evenly, "you are a right bastard sometimes."

"_It was _Gabriel_'s idea."_

"_Was not!"_ he was immediately contradicted. _"We wouldn't have left you in danger, boys, but we weren't worried about you."_

"And, my Cas, you're a terrible liar on top of that," Dean continued, actually laughing. "You can make up for it by finding out if it's dinnertime back at the base yet. If we come back as mighty hunters, there might be pie."

Except, Sam remembered, something had dropped Max down a cliff, as if to confuse the evidence. The scene had been cleaned up. Winchesters trusted their instincts, and the scene where Max had died had struck him as _intelligent…_

* * *

_Now: Rogue_; _raid +3 hours_

In the days to come, Dean would remember the things that had happened after they'd returned to Rogue and its devastation only in flashes and snatches of disconnected incidents that certain words would evoke in his memory in living color for a long time to come.

The first memory was _carnage_.

It was the violation of all these people in a space he considered his, even though the people were in a cargo bay that he'd only opened up recently. He wasn't even sure what _Castiel_ had been keeping in there, if anything, before he'd packed everything he might need to repair his _Baby_ into it and dragged all that stuff out over the boredom of the later months on Shadow. By the time they'd left that planet, it had been empty again, barring a bag of tools and a couple of pieces of scrap metal he'd probably been intending to melt down to patch up some of the holes in _Baby_'s hull.

But it had been a clean place, in that everything in there had been inorganic and inert, passive and malleable.

Now it was a scene of blood and pain, cold bodies and desperate cries, all the worse for the damage that had been done to fragile human lungs by exposure to vacuum. Someone – he didn't know her name – passed under his hands who had made the mistake of trying to hold her breath. The air had expanded in the vacuum and torn her chest apart from the inside. For a few more moments, she was still alive. He didn't know how she could have survived this long like this. Maybe she'd only been thrown out into the void as the Winchesters' ships had arrived.

He never learned her name. She died almost as soon as he got a good look at her and realized that he could only save her with time and luck and absolute concentration, not to mention a lot more medical know-how and emergency medical equipment than he had. The triage decision would have hurt, if the outcome hadn't been inevitable, and even so…the idea that they'd been just too late…

There was still blood on his hands as he passed her body off to one of the few people who had been lucky enough to be in a sealed compartment when the attack had happened. The blood never seemed to go away.

One of the first things Dean had done when _Castiel_ had transported in the first wave of casualties that he'd found had been to corral the healthiest and least shell-shocked survivor he could see. He wasn't exactly spoiled for choice. Most of them could barely stand up and focus on a single point. Strangers had tried to grab for him with frozen hands and been unable to scream when their skin broke into shattered webs after exposure to the near-absolute cold of vacuum. Reddened eyes stared blankly, blood vessels and delicate membranes shredded when the blood and viscera in them had frozen into billions of tiny ice crystals.

The worst of it, one of many worst things, was that there was only so much he could do.

At one point he found himself bent over a man who had probably been wounded in the attack, if the burns through his skin and the massive internal damage that the medical scanner Dean was still hanging onto revealed were any indication, before being deprived of enough air to continue functioning. He was still conscious, if only barely. The only thing keeping him awake and aware was probably the agonizing pain. His eyes were gone. The delicate skin and flesh of his mouth and throat had been frozen from the inside, silencing him, and only the unstoppable twitching of his entire body communicated how much pain he was in.

By then the choice was one he'd made – and all of his roped-in walking wounded had made – before and he was numb to it at the moment. He loaded up an injector with sedatives and put the man under. If he woke up from that, then he might stand a fighting chance. If not…well, he wouldn't feel it. They were going to go through the available stocks of sedatives soon. The same replicators that could make food and other materials could make medical supplies as well. They were going to need them.

Dean couldn't hear the sounds any more. He heard when some of the better-off survivors spoke to him, even responded after a fashion. But the cries of people in more pain than anyone should be in, he blocked out.

And they kept coming. Dean tried to tell himself that it was a good thing, that they needed to rescue as many survivors as possible, but the task seemed endless, and the pain immeasurable, beating against him like a physical force, demanding to be _stopped_.

Too much of it stopped permanently.

He refused to think about the fact that there were far more dead bodies still floating in the void, or burned in the destruction, or abandoned against the harsh rocks of Rogue, than there were aboard.

_My fault my fault my fault_ wouldn't stop whispering in his mind, under the chaos as people shouted for help and shouted to each other and _screamed_ or whimpered (and that was worse) and ran in all directions and carried supplies and used them up and moved those who could walk somewhere else away (from the space that had once been a nice clean private garage where he understood how to fix things that didn't hurt and had now become a front line that never ended) and carried the bodies of the dead away.

Later, Dean would remember a smear of blood on the floor and blood on his hands and clothes and – storm lords – in his hair and on his face. He would remember the unfamiliar sound of dozens – could it be as many as a hundred? Had they saved that many lives? More? – of voices echoing through the space that was his home, as unintelligibly as the screams of birds. There was the sweet-rotten stink of cold-burned flesh as it thawed, that later he couldn't stop smelling, no matter what he did.

In retrospect, he must have said none of this. He watched himself shove all of the horror of it away, assess the situation, make choices for strangers between life and death and pain and treatment. He heard himself give orders and take charge, organizing the people who could help and reassuring the people that could only suffer that they were safe, that they were being looked after.

Distantly, he realized he hadn't heard the sound of the transporter bringing in more victims recently. Forcing himself to scan the room for more wounded bearing the scars of vacuum exposure or blunt force trauma or suffocation or burns or any of the more exotic consequences of being suddenly attacked by whatever weaponry those damned ships had devised in their madness, he didn't have the energy to jump when a hand was laid over his despite the blood and worse on it.

"Dean," said Cas quietly.

He focused on that voice and those eyes as if they were his last lifeline to the real world, and even then he couldn't look at Cas directly. He kept wanting to look away, knowing that there was someone else in here screaming and hurting because _my fault my fault my fault_.

"Enough," Cas told him. "Look at me."

He had to force himself to do it, and when he managed to bring his gaze away from the charnel house that had once been a cargo bay and into the immediate field, it took a moment for him to understand that the same swaths of blood and human flesh and fluids, ash and ice, disinfectant and antiseptic that stained his hands and clothes were on Cas as well.

"Didn't know you were here," Dean ground out stiffly. "How long?"

Ignoring the mess on both of them, Cas wrapped a hand around the nape of his human lover's neck and rested his forehead against Dean's, breathing his air with him. "Two hours. A little more."

"Thought you were looking for survivors."

"I can do both."

_Oh, right_, Dean thought, and said so. "How long have I been down here?"

"Three and a half hours."

He was bone-tired and, he suspected dully, in some sort of shock. He wasn't a medic. He could look after himself and he could look after Sam when either of them got hurt but this sort of endless onslaught of suffering and trauma was outside his experience. Briefly, Dean considered just staying here, with Cas, and not moving or speaking ever again. This moment. Here and now. No more and nothing more.

When he spoke his voice was almost inaudible. "How many'd we save?"

"I have one hundred and fifty three here, alive." The numbers helped. Numbers made sense. Numbers didn't bleed, or scream without voices through mouths and faces black with frozen blood. Numbers didn't have fingers to snap off at the knuckle when they tried to break their fall because they'd tried to get up only to have their legs give out under them because their feet and joints had frozen into useless lumps. "_Gabriel_ has one hundred and ninety-three."

He didn't want to ask. He had to ask. "How many'd we lose? How many didn't we save?" Dean heard his voice get louder and didn't care. "How many'd we let those bastards kill?"

When Cas looked away, Dean didn't have the energy to care. "Don't ask me that, Dean. Enough," he repeated. "You need to rest and clean up and so do I."

The respite was far too temporary, and for the first time Dean found himself wishing that _Castiel_ traveled with more human crew.

* * *

_+ 1 day_

The second memory was _shame_.

While Dean hated yelling for help, he was actually capable of admitting it when he was out of his depth. He just didn't _like_ it. And he especially didn't like telling people that he and his had failed (_my fault my fault my fault_) at something they'd been set to do.

They had to replace Rogue's relay beacon before they could get a message out. That took up some more time, although not as much as it could have. The original one had vanished along with the _Maze Runner_. And vanished it had, the ships confirmed. There wasn't enough debris on the surface for the big ship to have been destroyed. They hadn't seen any of it in orbit, either.

Knowing that the Fleet would want to know about this disaster, especially as the dark Fleet seemed to be involved, the four of them assembled through the holographic projections to talk things over and share ideas and (as often happened) shout at each other. From Dean and Cas's points of view, they were in Dean's favorite lounge, which was one of the places he'd declared off limits to their shell-shocked but progressively more active guests. He'd made a list of the rooms he didn't want anyone but himself and Cas in. His private rooms were on it. The lounge. The Control Room. A room Dean had rebuilt into a kitchen years ago because "cooking's kind of interesting, when I've got time, y'see, Cas. Don't laugh."

_Castiel_ had locked those doors and several more that Dean hadn't thought to place off limits because the human never went there. There were recesses of the ship that _Castiel_ was purely responsible for maintaining. The engine complex that allowed access to his flightdrive, for one. The access points to the weapons that had been retrofitted into him recently were sealed away as securely as he knew how without welding them shut. So were a few labs that had some exotic chemicals and materials stored in them.

In the end, he'd restricted access to almost everything that wasn't an improvised sickbay or equally lashed-up living quarters. The starship was equipped to carry more crew than just a single human, if he'd cared to, but he had everything he wanted in Dean. The other rooms generally gathered dust. Until now.

"It's not the only one of their crafts to be just gone, either," Cas told them all. "We've identified seven barges that were destroyed. All the armed ones were targeted, probably the moment their attackers dropped out of flight."

"That's what I'd do," Dean muttered unwillingly. "Damn, I wish they were stupid. It would be so much easier if they were stupid as well as crazy. I hate smart psychos. And the rest?"

"There isn't enough wreckage to account for the other eight," pointed out _Gabriel_. He and Sam both looked about as tired as Dean felt. Some time ago, Sam had acquired an enormous armchair that Dean was actually quite jealous of. More of an extended couch than a chair, it was big enough to sleep in. Only the fact that the list of suspects would be limited to just him had kept him from trying to steal it. At the moment, Sam had collapsed into it with the air of someone who doesn't intend to move for anything more significant than a large fire, and even then only if it was in the chair. He probably had his eyes closed, but since he had one arm over his face it was hard to tell. A few minutes after they'd gotten the two-way holographic link set up, _Gabriel_ had padded into the room and joined Sam on that chair without waiting for permission. He was currently sprawled across Dean's little brother like a giant cat, one that knows it has a perfect right to be in this space and doesn't particularly care that someone else was there first.

"So where'd they go?"

"_Not here. I don't know. How in all the hells should I know?"_

Sam lifted a hand. "Gabriel, _don't snap at him. Any ideas?_"

Miraculously, _Gabriel_ actually backed down. _"One. And it doesn't make any sense."_

"At this point, I'll take anything."

"_Conditionally anything,"_ Sam corrected.

"_Even I know it's not the time to screw around, Sammy. Look, we know this is_ Samael_'s_ _old gang at work, right?"_

"You said you recognized the jamming signal," Dean agreed. "And Cas salvaged something out of the good ol' black box, right Cas?"

Cas nodded mutely. Watching the attack by reviewing data records was so much more _immediate_ for a ship. He'd literally downloaded what information he could into his mind and that meant that reviewing it was like watching the attack firsthand. He hadn't realized, until it was far too late, just how much re-experiencing a devastating assault by ships that already frightened him would intensify those memories.

And they still didn't know, for all that, just which ships had survived to stalk this universe. _Daniel_ and _Zadkiel_ had reported a sighting of _Hester_ in a completely different sector of the galaxy. Ships were fast, but there was no way she could have covered the distance between there and here in the time allotted. Had they split up? It was unlikely. Ships didn't fly on their own unless they had a human companion, and _Hester_, like all of the dark Fleet, had rejected humanity. Someone had to be with her.

It had taken only two of the dark Fleet to reduce the Rogue expedition to shattered rubble and disappeared ships. _Castiel_ had recognized them, even in the fleeting glimpses that the barges under attack had gotten automatically, as _Zachariah_ and _Inias_. That was three survivors accounted for. They still didn't know who the fourth was…or where that fourth ship was.

"_I know they can drag ships around,"_ _Gabriel_ explained. _"They did it to me. I don't know what those ships would want with a bunch of barges, but maybe they took them away rather than destroying them outright."_

"Huh," Dean said. He didn't know what the mad and broken dark Fleet would want with the mining barges either. Spare parts?

_Hostages? _Storm lords, please not that.

He offered up both these theories and everyone flinched at the latter while that voice in Dean's mind said _my fault my fault my fault_ endlessly and insistently, especially when the starships ran a quick check of the people they had that they'd managed to identify against a list they'd gotten somewhere of the people involved in the mining expedition and found that everyone on board was from one of those destroyed ships.

The others were gone without a trace.

They needed more information and they needed more firepower and they needed medical attention for just about all of the survivors that they'd rescued from the cold black. Unfortunately, that meant contacting the Fleet and asking for help.

The only mercy was that it was Ellen who got back to them and not one of the admirals and commanders who liked them much less. She was not happy.

Most of what she said in response to the news before she got her thoughts in order, the recorder didn't pick up, but some particularly pungent phrases got through. Dean was impressed. Under better circumstances, he might have been taking notes.

"Stay put," she said finally, lifting her head out of the hands she'd been swearing into. Dean half-expected to see blisters erupt over the surface of her desk. "Do you hear me? Am I quite clear? Do not go anywhere. If you're not in orbit of the rogue planet when reinforcements get there, and you haven't been there the whole time, I will skin the lot of you alive. If you even _think_ about taking off after these ships on your own, you'll be on lockdown at Launch Station for the next decade. _Separately!_ I will raid Bobby's shop for some big pliers and personally come over there and rip important bits out of two ships' engines, and then I will use those same pliers to rip important bits off Winchesters. And I'll keep those bits in jars on my office desk to terrify future generations of foolhardy idiots who get involved in star-shaking interstellar incidents on a _milk run_. Again! Understood?"

Diatribe and orders delivered in equal measures, she looked around as if she might be overheard or interrupted and added in an entirely different tone, "Now, look, boys, this wasn't your fault. It's not on you. The timing's too perfect to be coincidence. It's too neat. If they were stalking that fleet and waiting for their chance to strike then they'd have done this whether or not you'd left when you did or a week later. You did what you were told. You got 'em there. And you went back for them. That's what matters. You've got survivors. I'm going to make damn sure no one forgets that, got it?"

Ellen reached out to switch off the recorder, thought better of it, and added, "And _stay put!_" at volume. Only then did the message end.

* * *

_+ 3 days_

The third memory was _retreat_.

As ordered, they'd stayed put, although Dean figured out a couple of days in that while the humans the ships were carrying could hide from the void and the destruction still out there behind solid bulkheads and the lights and regular half-darkness of the ships' days and nights, the ships couldn't avoid the sight of wreckage and the human dead.

He brought up the subject to Cas, who brushed him away and asked him to check up on a group of people they'd billeted away in a disused lab that had been hastily converted into a livable space, primarily because of its running water. Two hours later, after talking to shell-shocked survivors, checking the damage caused by anoxia and lack of air pressure and the beyond-ice cold of vacuum exposure, and fixing an array of plumbing that was being taxed beyond its design specifications for unorthodox purposes, he'd quite forgotten that he'd mentioned it.

The past couple of days had been hard on them both, starship and human man, not just because of the gruesome spectacle outside, or the worry that _Zachariah_ and _Inias_ or whoever else was still out there might come back, or even the constant hiss of _my fault my fault my fault_ that followed Dean wherever he went, but because of the psychological shock of having their private world transformed into a trauma ward full of strangers.

Seven more people died of their injuries after the initial overwhelming rescue. Most slipped away quietly. More got worse rather than better.

One man, having been unable to get any sleep at all since the attack and thus both traumatized and sleep deprived, tried to kill himself. He failed only because _Castiel_ was paying attention to everyone in his care, and materialized as a hologram in time to pull the power drill, one of several devices that Dean had left in a crate with some of his other tools, away from the wounded man. The poor bastard had been beyond rationality at that point, screaming unintelligibly – or so Dean thought at the time, based on what he heard from the human witnesses – about traps and torture chambers and monsters and _Castiel_ had been forced to use the power that the projection could wield to knock him away and then out. Which Dean supposed was a mercy of sort, he told his starship partner later. At least he was under.

Some hours after that, Dean fell back to his quarters, trying to escape the people who all _wanted_ something from him, whether it was to ask questions about missing crewmates or request more supplies or tell him that they'd tried to change or do something and they hadn't been able to, why was that?

"Dammit," he'd snapped at that last, somewhat more harshly than necessary, "if Cas wanted you to have access to his tactical maps of the area, he'd let you have them. I'm not going to overrule him. Can't you get it through your head that I don't run this ship? I work with him, that's all, and if he makes a call then it's his call to make. Okay?"

That had turned into an extended argument complicated by the fact that the person asking was one of the tactical officers from the armed and now destroyed _Silver Nemesis_, and he was raring to get at the ships that had destroyed his spacecraft. He didn't seem to understand that he only needed to ask for the information, not jab at display screens angrily and repetitively, but that he'd be told there wasn't any information because Cas didn't _know_ where they'd gone. Some people, it seemed, were still holding onto the idea that the ship wasn't smart enough to hold a reasonable conversation with, but a large majority of everyone else who was upright and functioning seemed to have gotten the hang of asking the ship for things directly.

Irritated and just about physically itching with the presence of all these people in his space, Dean stormed off to his quarters intending to lock the door and not come out for a while. He liked people well enough. He didn't mind crowds. He wasn't an essentially solitary person. But walking past other people in the corridors between a cargo bay full of blankets and medical equipment and the smell and sound of many people in a relatively confined space to his rooms felt wrong. He missed the privacy. Sure, he'd gotten used to having no personal space at all – Cas had always stood too close and looked too intently at him even before they'd fallen into bed together and even more so afterwards – but that was different.

On the way, Dean pushed past a knot of people who were poking at a display panel with the air of computer users throughout the ages who had been working with a working computer just a moment ago only to be suddenly confronted with an unresponsive screen for no reason. One of them was speaking to the wall imperiously, as if that would help. As he passed, she tried to snag his arm, probably to ask for help. Dean stepped away out of her reach. He wasn't in the mood. She was standing on her own two feet and not in immediate peril, so she could wait. And he'd caught one of the commands she'd been issuing and it had begun with "Ship! Get me –"

And then there were the ones who looked at him like his presence was unwelcome, like he was an intruder in their homes rather than them intruding into his. The ones who rejected his help even when it was offered. Dean didn't know what it was about him that they had a problem with. But he could take a guess, from a variety of options. Maybe they blamed him for failing to save the people who had died. _My fault my fault my fault_, that voice said to that possibility. Maybe they blamed him for leaving and leaving them vulnerable to attack; the voice agreed. Maybe they didn't like his shirt, which was just too bad; he liked this shirt.

He spotted one person from the _Prometheus_ who he'd worked with to fix their flightdrive. The man had amused himself by making comments and jokes about the sort of people who, in his opinion, couldn't find a human who would deign to sleep with them and who then had to resort to artificial substitutes. A number of his crewmates had laughed with him. Dean had barely kept himself from decking the man a good one at the time. Only the fact that he'd been holding a large wrench at the time and he'd probably kill the bastard had stopped him. Although he'd wanted to. So it could have been that; Dean had been confined to enough sickbay beds in his time to know that there was absolutely nothing else to do but talk, sleep, and stare at the wall or, if you were really lucky, a book or screen.

These people, he thought more than a bit unkindly, didn't belong. He knew they'd suffered, were suffering; had lost friends and livelihoods and in some cases body parts, but he had limits on how many disputes over sleeping space he could arbitrate and how often he wanted to make sure that no one was overdosing on painkillers that the medical replicators were still putting out in bulk. They'd already lost two people that way. Dean was pretty sure that had been deliberate on their parts.

It seemed like a very long way back to his private rooms. The door opened automatically at his touch and he closed it behind him with a sigh of relief, leaning against the door and closing his eyes. _Silence._ Nothing but the rhythmic hum of powerful engines burning power even as they idled deep inside the ship. It was wonderful.

It was also, he noticed a few seconds of relief later, not quite complete. His senses, trained to hunt and survive and pick up tiny cues in a combat situation, heard breathing and detected someone else's presence.

"Cas?" Dean asked, recognizing the indefinable presence of his lover on a fundamental level.

In the darkness, a shape buried in the blankets on Dean's bed stirred. The human kicked off his shoes and crossed the room to enter the other chamber, seating himself at the head of the bed and resting his hand on the shapeless form beneath the covers. He traced his fingers back and forth reassuringly, curiously.

"What're you doing here, man?"

A single movement beneath the multiple layers of blankets became several as Cas emerged from the hiding place he'd made. "They're so loud," he said softly when he was visible again. "…I thought it would help, if I had one set of senses without any demands on them."

"So you switched the lights off and pulled the covers over your head? Did it help?"

"Somewhat. Not enough. The rescues – they all want things. Make them stop, Dean."

Uncomfortably, Dean realized he'd been telling people _ask Cas_ quite a lot. "You're not keeping up?" he wanted to know instead.

"It's not that." The ship's human avatar rested a hand on the human's thigh, familiarly. Dean ran a hand through his hair in reply, unsure whether he was trying to comb Cas's flyaway dark hair into a somewhat organized state or muss it up further. Either worked. Dean was personally quite fond of that windswept, just-crawled-out-of-bed look on his companion, especially when he really just had.

"I'd get it if it was, you know. I came back here to get away. Not like when it's just you and me and our brothers, is it?"

Cas hid his face against Dean's side, nudging the human when he stopped petting his hair. It had felt nice, and he had needed that more than he had realized. Calming and secure and just them. "It's the way they talk to me," he explained as Dean chuckled – which also felt nice – and continued. "They're used to ships that don't think, so they give orders. They say _I need_ and they mean it. They say _do this_ like I don't have a choice. And they never stop. They're all so angry and lost. They're miserable, and they're hurting."

After a brief pause, he resumed, "No wonder their ships don't think. I don't want to be alone, you know we can't do that, but there's a difference between being part of a group, a Fleet, and this. We choose our own company. But they _demand_. I couldn't bear waiting on the command of everyone around me, all the time. Like a servant." His voice got darker, growling into Dean's skin, "Like a _slave_."

It was a testament to how absolutely safe Dean felt with Cas that the human's first response was, "Damn, Cas, I'm sorry. You're set up to handle everything you are, and I'm used to that. I've been telling every one of them to go to you with the things I don't know or that you usually handle for me."

"Different with you," muttered Cas. "Chose you."

Dean couldn't help the affectionate smile. "Move over a minute?" Cas pulled away and looked at him, puzzled momentarily until the human shifted down into the space his movement had freed up so that they were lying in each other's arms and Dean could press a kiss to one distinct cheekbone without having to stretch uncomfortably. "Better."

"They don't want to talk to me," Cas confessed, "not as me. They're scared of me."

"Why?"

The hand resting over Dean's heart clenched into claws. "Why do you think? My brothers dropped out of the sky and killed their friends."

Dean was going to kill someone with that power drill even though it had been safely locked away. "The man who tried to kill himself. That's what he was raving about when you showed up, wasn't it?" He didn't need an answer. He knew it was true. "And they think that's on _you_?"

His lover sounded truly miserable. It was a certain variety of deadpan that Dean had only learned to pick out through experience he wished he didn't have. "There's evil in them. They're killers. I can see it every second, Dean, what they've done. I can't _stop_ seeing it. Some of the humans…that's all they know about us. That some of us kill. That we're dangerous."

"You know it's not true," said Dean sternly. "It's just them, Cas. Just because they got broken doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you or the rest of your family."

"I hope not."

"There isn't." And that, Dean decided, was that. And he said so.

"Do you want me to go?" Dean offered sometime later, seeing the way Cas's eyes closed and he flinched every so often as the ship proper dealt with over a hundred and fifty more people at a time than he was accustomed to, part of his consciousness hiding in the human body and providing a retreat. "If the quiet was working for you –"

Cas cut him off before he could finish the sentence. "Never," he said, and repeated himself just for good measure. "Never leave me."

Storm lords, Dean was in over his head, he thought for the thousandth time. He knew it perfectly well and accepted it. "I won't, Cas. I go where you do. You know that."

* * *

_+ 5 days_

The fourth memory was _tainted_.

By then they'd arranged to meet as a family at least once per day at a set time, just to keep them all sane. If they had to endure forced company with scores of angry and scared and needy strangers, they needed at least some time when they could lock the doors, narrow their world down to two rooms that overlapped through the wonders of holographic projection, and pretend it was just them for light-years in every direction.

The link was already set up automatically when Dean walked into his lounge and straight into a screaming argument between Sam and _Gabriel_ that was being broadcast into it.

"—_don't care, _Gabriel_! It was petty and nasty and dangerous – and _stupid_! It wasn't funny and there's no excuse for—"_

"_I didn't hurt him!"_ the little redhead shouted back, up in Sam's space and managing to square off with the much taller man through volume and assertiveness alone, jabbing a finger aggressively into his chest. _"I'm bored and he deserved it!"_

"_You could have killed him!"_ roared Sam. _"We're responsible for these people, _Gabriel_! They can't get away from you any more than you can get away from them, and storm lords know I bet they want to by now!"_ He smacked away the offending finger and raised the stakes by grabbing a handful of the shirt _Gabriel_'s human self was wearing and using it to drag the man as far up towards Sam's eye level as possible. Outraged and off balance, _Gabriel_ pushed him away, the avatar's enhanced strength and speed knocking Sam backwards. Still, he kept hold of the fabric, locking the two of them into an escalating scuffle as they yelled at each other.

Neither of them had noticed Dean yet, much less Cas, who had appeared at Dean's side silently. Dean placed a finger over his own lips in the universal symbol for _silence_, thought better of it and put that same finger onto Cas's lips instead in half a caress, and returned his attention to eavesdropping. He wasn't sure if it counted as eavesdropping if he couldn't avoid hearing the shouting. Calmly, he weighed their chances against each other, realized he didn't know what they were arguing about, and decided to hold his tongue until someone was about to get hurt. Besides, whatever Sam was chewing out _Gabriel_ over, the odds were good that the trickster starship soundly deserved it.

"_We gotta behave! You know that! You know what's at stake!" _

_Gabriel_ tried to say something but Sam didn't let him get a word in edgeways. _"We are _tainted_, _Gabriel_!"_

Whatever the ship had been expecting, it wasn't that, if the way he jerked back was any indication. Pressing his advantage, and following the man step for step, staying all but nose-to-nose with him, Sam snarled, _"There's the stink of that place on us and you know it! We put a foot out of line and __they'll take you away from me, _Gabriel_! They'll take _me_ away from _you_, and don't tell me they haven't been looking for an excuse to take you apart for scrap since day one! Don't you give them one! Don't you do it! I won't let you!"_

Chastened somewhat, the starship's human avatar dropped his eyes and tried to look anywhere but at his human partner. Inevitably, as his attention reached for anything else but Sam, it fell on their audience.

"_Uh, Sammy, we've got company,"_ _Gabriel_ muttered.

Sam followed his gaze and jumped, releasing the handful of shirt he'd still held. _"Dean! How long have you been there?"_

"Long enough to hear the yelling, but not enough to know what it started out about."

Clearly far past exasperated, Sam ran his hands through his hair, possibly to stop himself from shaking _Gabriel_ until he rattled. Dean could understand the temptation; he'd often wanted to do that himself. _"_Gabriel_ picked _now_ to start playing potentially deadly pranks on people he doesn't like."_

"…_deserved it…"_ complained _Gabriel_, loud enough to be heard and quiet enough that Sam could ignore it.

"_You dropped him down an elevator shaft, _Gabriel_!"_

"Wait, what?" Dean had to know.

"_I didn't let him hit,"_ the starship said defensively. _"I reversed the gravity before he reached the bottom. And maybe a few more times until he slowed down enough to land safely. But he'd tried to break into a service hatch that leads right to the armory Launch Station built in while we were there, Sam! I told him not to and I told him again and I told him why and he didn't listen to me! He told me to shut up and last time he checked people told computers what to do, not the other way round. And I'm not a computer and if he doesn't know that I don't think he should count as a person."_

Dean chose to ignore that, if only because he agreed and he didn't want to be agreeing with _Gabriel_ right now. He didn't get nauseous easily – it was not a desirable trait in spacefarers – but he'd felt a little green at the idea of being snapped back and forth like a yoyo as the gravity flipped around. "What was he trying to get into the armory for?"

"_I have no idea. He wouldn't tell me."_

"_And now he definitely won't. _Gabriel_, let me deal with people like that. They're idiots, okay? But you won't make them any smarter by nearly killing them. I don't care how under control you had the situation. Look, I'll remind them to sit tight and that we've got ships coming to get them out of here, all right? And that locked means locked."_

Glancing over his shoulder in the relative direction of Dean and Cas, he added, _"We're not done talking about this, you hear me?"_

Dean had been on the receiving end of one of those ultimatums before, many times. Sam meant it. He'd manage to say his piece no matter what else was going on, there was no avoiding it.

"Any other stories like that going on over there?" he asked in an attempt to lighten the mood.

Sam sighed, backing into a wall and slumping all the way to the floor. _"I don't want to talk about it."_

His brother made a note to define _mixed signals_ to Sam sometime soon. Although, given the way _Gabriel_ had retreated to the furthest possible corner of the room away from Sam, and comparing that to the way they'd been all over each other only a few days ago, he would lay bets that Sam already had a thorough and in-depth understanding of the concept.

* * *

_+ 6 days_

Fortunately, that was when the Fleet showed up in numbers, loaded for the proverbial bear and yelling for metaphorical blood. At that point, their arrival was the best news they could expect.

* * *

_to be continued_


	7. The Head of a Pin

**Chapter Seven: The Head of a Pin**

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_Then: Shadow_

A storm blew down from the mountains around midday, pulling Sam away from his seventeenth review, according to the display panel's records, of the information the xenobiology and medical departments had gotten out of the corpse of the troll creature that the Winchesters had brought back very dead. He was sure he was missing something, but he didn't know what.

"Oh, hell," was the verdict of the little blonde climatologist, Meg, when Sam innocently looked up and commented that "That's a weird-looking cloud."

"Not another one," she complained. Raising her voice, she yelled at an impressive volume for such a small woman, "Pack it up, people! Look what's coming on!"

Sam knelt to help her gather her equipment when she gestured at him to do so. "I'm guessing that's not rain?"

She laughed. "No such luck. It's not a cloud, it's a dust storm. Or something like it." They worked as they talked, efficiently. "That's dust, seeds, pollen, and all sorts of crap that blows around in the mountains until it hits some critical mass and starts dropping down through the atmosphere until it blows itself out. Damned if I can figure out how it starts up so fast or why it happens so often yet."

"Sounds nasty." Sam handed her a complex telescopic device and let her break it down.

"No kidding. The last one was massive. Covered the whole area and we had to stay inside for three weeks! That was months before you got here. We were probably due another one. Wish I could predict them. Here, you take this." Meg looked around, assessing her team and rating their progress against the looming black cloud, which did seem to be getting closer with every second. "We're not going to have enough time to move this stuff by hand, are we?"

"Might do, you show me how to switch this off."

Without looking, she kicked the machine that Sam had been poking around in an attempt to deactivate it. It switched off. "Any chance of a lift out?"

_Gabriel_ would probably be willing to get them all back to base, Sam knew, as long as he promised to owe the ship a favor later. Depending on when that later was and what happened in between, there was a possibility that Sam would quite enjoy that too, so he promised to ask. "We really can't stay out in it? Shadow's weather is going to be your specialty; I thought you'd want to study it."

Meg jammed two fingers in her mouth and whistled for her team to gather. "Leave that!" she roared when a couple of hapless people tried to dawdle under the weight of their equipment. "If it survives we'll get good data. We gotta go!" Over the three weeks Sam and his brother had been on Shadow, Sam had already learned that Meg felt like people underestimated her because of her size and slightly elfin features, so she took as many opportunities as she could find to prove them wrong. Sam had shrugged when she'd eyed him up, and pointed out that just about everyone was shorter than him, so he didn't care how tall she was or wasn't.

She'd apparently taken a shine to him since then, and had invited him out on this trip even though he didn't have the first clue what half of her machines did or even what she was talking about most of the time. He suspected he was flirting with him quite often. He might have been interested – she was a very pretty little elfin blonde woman – if he wasn't already dealing with one set of mixed signals and half-offered invitations. To be fair, Sam knew he was putting out his fair share of those in return.

"The stuff in that wind storm gets in everything, Sam. You know what the official name for them is?" She barreled on without waiting for him to guess. "Rufus named them 'S storms'. Officially, that's short for either Shadow storms or suspension storms, for particles in suspension." A grin told him this wasn't the full story. "You and I and everyone here all know it's really short for shitstorms. And that's what they are. That cloud up there is going to blow down dust and black grit and stuff that gets in people's lungs. We've had to ship more people off world every time one blows up. It gets in their systems and suddenly it's like the whole planet's poisonous to them. I'll be happy to tell you all about it once we're indoors."

Her team was mostly assembled now, panting men and women either laboring under the weight of sample-taking and scan-recording analytical machinery or staring up at the black storm apprehensively. "How about that lift now?"

Sam called in. "Give me a moment," he excused himself, and then added to the open comm channel, "_Gabriel_, you there?"

"_Where else would I be?"_ was the ship's immediate answer.

"You're not as funny as you think you are," Sam parried calmly. "I'm out in—"

"_I know where you are."_

"See the dust storm?"

"_Yeah. Little blonde hussy doesn't want to stay and watch? 'Cause I could live with that."_

"_Gabriel_. Be nice." _Gabriel_ had formed opinions, often at one remove, about many of the Shadow survey team. He didn't like Meg. Sam suspected he was jealous of the time she had been spending with him and that she had adopted the habit of standing inside his personal space so that he had to look sharply down at her. _Gabriel_ was picky about letting people that close and while he didn't have the right just yet to extend those rules to Sam he was sure going to try. And then there was the flirting he hadn't remembered to acknowledge. "Or if you can't manage that, and I wouldn't be surprised, be useful instead. It blew in fast and we can't outrun it. Take us all back to the base, please?"

"_Oh, all right,"_ _Gabriel_ sighed. Sam flicked a thumbs-up at Meg, who was eavesdropping unrepentantly on the side of the conversation she could hear. _"I can't leave her out here?"_

"Absolutely not."

They rematerialized in the grounded ship's open main shuttlebay, a gaping cavernous space that served as the base's front hall. In another, smaller, bay, Sam knew, Dean was probably still up to his elbows in the wreckage of his half-shattered shuttlecraft, which he had turned to rebuilding as his next task once their troll hunt had ended successfully. Here, though, there was a parade of people trekking up the switchbacks of the ramp that led from the bay door to the planet's surface. An eclectic set of stations, tables, and booths had also migrated in, as the entire base used the enormous bay as a jumping-off point.

"Was just about to call you," the survey's leader Rufus greeted them laconically, barely looking up from a display panel that, from the way he scanned their group and then tapped the screen, was probably a head count of personnel out on the surface. "You saw that shit blowing our way?"

Sam raised a hand to them both to signal both _hello _and _wait_, and resumed talking to _Gabriel_. "Will you let me know when it's about to get here?" he asked. "It looks like it's going to hit hard."

"_Sure,"_ the starship agreed, dismissively, _"although I don't know why you'd worry about it. It's just wind and some junk."_

Meg disagreed, although she didn't know it, and she was still talking to Rufus. "Looked nasty, too," she said to him, snapping her fingers at her team until they started picking up the equipment that _Gabriel_ had sent along with them and moving it to 'their' booth and parts unknown. Most of their foot-dragging and pulled faces was probably for show; they'd hauled it out to the skimmer this morning without any problem whatsoever.

"I'm not worried. I'm interested," Sam said to _Gabriel_ around her. "I didn't know Shadow did this. And neither did you. I'll let you know what I think about it later, all right?"

Taking _Gabriel_'s _"Okay, but it's just wind, how interesting can it be?"_ as a version of _talk to you later_, Sam switched off the connection and returned his attention to his human companions. Meg was watching him curiously. Well, staring unabashedly and a bit skeptically might be a more accurate description.

"Doesn't that get old after a while?" she asked frankly.

Sam stared back at her, genuinely confused. "Does what?"

"Having to baby a computer that complex."

It still took him a second to figure out what she was talking about. "Wait, what? I don't baby him. Anything but, actually! He can be quite a brat sometimes, but I talk to him because I like to. _Gabriel_ isn't a machine to be used; he's a friend, probably my best friend. And he's not a computer, not really. I really hope he didn't hear that, because he'll get really annoyed if you call him that. He'll make your life a living hell if he doesn't like you." _And he doesn't,_ Sam didn't tell her, _because you're acting friendly to me and sometimes I think he'd like to lock me in my room where I'd be safe from everything…except him, of course_.

Meg shrugged. "If you say so. I've never actually talked to something like your ship."

If Sam squinted out of the bay doors, which he was doing to avoid staring incredulously at Meg, he could just about see a shimmer in the air that was probably the storm approaching. "Does this happen a lot?" he asked both of them, hoping to change the subject.

"Often enough that we know how to deal with them." Rufus shrugged. "Adds up to batten hatches and sit and wait for it to go away, but we've been rained in before and we will again. Go check window ports or something. Get out of here."

It seemed like sensible advice, so Sam left the shuttlebay – and Meg – to ask the ship's non-sentient computer if the hull had been compromised in any way. It reported an emergency hatch that had been left open, probably deliberately and probably as a window with more realism than computer projections. He thought for a moment, working through his mental map of the extensive ship, and set off in that direction.

Meg intercepted him before he got very far. "Look at this," she offered, holding out a jar like a peace offering. Sam opened it as he walked to reveal a mixture of black sandy grit. Interspersed with it were half-buried bits of fluffy seeds, but the majority was black grit.

"This is what that storm is made of? Can I touch?"

"No, not with your bare hands. It sticks like anything. I lose more bits of it every time I open it as it is. Gets _everywhere_. Here, see if these fit your hands." She pulled a pair of thin gloves from a back pocket and offered them to him. Sam traded the jar back to her for a minute while he put them on, and then ran his fingers through the material in the jar. It trickled through his fingers oddly. The grit passed through and around his fingers like…he didn't know how to describe it. It didn't feel like sand and it didn't feel like dust, regardless of what it looked like. It was almost smooth, like infinitesimal marbles. For a moment he thought he could feel discrete units large enough to distinguish, but when he tried to get hold of one between pinching fingers he pulled them back with nothing to show for it.

"This is weird. I wouldn't like a face full of it, that's for sure. Good call bringing us back in."

"There's other stuff in it too," she added, "or at least there was last time. Someone will probably have to go out and take a sample of this shitstorm. Bet it ends up being me. And it always seems to come down off those mountains. Guess that's where all the creepies on this planet live."

Sam reminded her about the flying red ants and she flinched. "Yeah, and then there's those. I was trying to forget about them. Thanks very much, Sam. You know what happens when someone gets bit by one of those things?"

"No."

"Neither do I. And I'd like to keep it that way." Acknowledging the face he pulled with a puckish grin of her own – he'd walked straight into that one, and after years of _Gabriel_ and longer of Dean he should have seen it coming – Meg went on to explain, "It blows around all the seeds and dry dead grass down here in the grasslands, and humans are really vulnerable to it if enough gets in the lungs. Did anyone tell you about that?"

_Castiel_ and _Gabriel_ had come across it while following up Rufus' comment on the _other_ deaths on Shadow, before Max. Sam decided not to say that. "No-one here thought to mention it." True. "Anything I need to worry about?"

"Only if you breathe too much of it in. And don't ask me how much is too much. Some people get one whiff of it and they're coughing like something's crawled down their throat, so then they have to transfer somewhere else. Others, storms blow over and dust and pollen and seeds get everywhere and they're fine time after time, but one day it gets to them. You'll probably be okay."

They reached the place with the reported open hatch. It was a nexus point where several corridors met, creating an open space. Several chairs and a folding table sat scattered around, with cards scattered across the latter. An open airlock looked out on the distant ocean, away from the mountains and their approaching dust storm. Handing the jar of black storm-borne dust back to Meg along with the gloves, Sam closed and locked it, checking the seal to make sure it was airtight and wouldn't let in any of that dust.

"Hmm," said Meg, peeking at one of the poker hands left out on the table. "Not bad." She checked the others. "Nah, this guy's going to win, as long as he figures out that she's bluffing."

Sam looked over her shoulder easily and agreed with her assessment. "You play?"

"Sure. You?"

"Dean taught me how when I was a kid. He won a lot. I was thirteen before I figured out how he was cheating. I hit him – well, I tried, he was bigger than me at the time – and then I made him show me how to do it. But yeah, we're both pretty mean poker players even when we're playing a straight game. We know all each other's tricks by now, anyway."

Meg eyed him up and down, critically. "Now that you mention it, I think this is the longest I've seen you without your brother."

Sam stomped on the temptation to blush like she'd accused him of something. "He's fixing up _Baby_ – ah, that's his shuttlecraft. The one that had to be transported into the auxiliary shuttlebay, because she's not fit to fly? Hell, _Baby_'s barely fit to fall out of the sky right now, and it's driving him nuts. He named that little ship right. She's truly his pride and joy. Dean's been wanting to get her shipshape again for weeks now. And he's having more fun with it than I would. Besides, he's crazy about _Baby_. Any work I did, he'd insist on checking, so he may as well do it all himself. He's got his music on loud enough to shake the walls, last time I checked on him. Barely realized I was there, except to get me to pass him one of his custom wrenches. Dived right back into the engine and never noticed when I left. I bet he won't even know when the dust storm comes overhead."

She laughed at the description. "I was getting the idea you two were joined at the hip."

Her tone said she was teasing, but Sam didn't like people commenting on the close relationship between him and his brother. That was a private thing, a family thing, and it was all too easy to see perfectly harmless people as intruders on it just for asking.

"We rely on each other a lot," he said shortly. "Usually we're all we have. We're used to it."

"Sounds lonely," Meg commented wistfully, tipping her head to one side to look up at him out of the corner of her eye. He half expected her to start fluttering her eyelashes.

"_Sammy,"_ _Gabriel_'s voice said in his ear – Sam was going to have to start putting his foot down about that, however belatedly, if he didn't want to get _used_ to it – _"here it comes."_ The subtle background noise of an open carrier wave cut off almost immediately; _Gabriel_ wasn't expecting a reply.

"It's not." His tone said – he hoped – _drop it_ to Meg.

She did, only to pick up something else as a rattling sound that had been building softly in the background became an audible rustle and then a roar.

"Look, I think I upset you earlier. I didn't mean to. Really. It just sounded like you were reassuring your sh—your friend—and I didn't think they needed that."

Sam decided to accept her apology. If the question had genuinely been in ignorance then he couldn't fault her for trying to get more information. If she'd been trying to annoy him, why would she apologize? "It's all right. _Gabriel_ – and his brother _Castiel_, Dean's ship, and all of them, really – are just like humans, even though they don't look like it sometimes. And sometimes they like to pretend that they're not, but they're bluffing. Mostly they need the same things we do. They'll deny that too, by the way. They care about their friends. Surely not everything you say to your friends is vitally important new information? Dean and I go into dangerous situations all the time, and sometimes it's nice to just talk."

Meg nodded. "Okay. I get it. Maybe you could introduce me sometime?"

"Maybe," Sam made no promises.

"Tell you what, why don't you come out with me?"

His face must have been a model of confusion, because she laughed and said, "Not like that! You're cute, but if you were interested you would have caught hints more subtle than that." He didn't get a chance to get a word in edgeways – and he didn't quite know what that word would be – as she barreled on. "Sometime in the next half hour, Rufus is going to decide that we need samples of this storm. I know that, because that's what we did for the last four. And since Jake rigged up some envirosuits to function in these shitstorms, he's going to want samples from different places. Has to be done by hand, walking the sieves around. Rovers and remotes get too much grit in their gears. You want to come along?"

Sam agreed to. Why not?

Sure enough, within half an hour they were climbing into modified space suits that would allow them to move through the dust storm without choking on it or being shredded by anything larger than an airborne seed. A lot of the insulation had been taken out, but the skin of the suit had been coated with a substance that Meg – and Josie, who was helping them into the suits – claimed was even better than the standard laminate at resisting the worst of the dust and preventing it from flaying the fabric apart thread by thread. The weight of the air recycler between Sam's shoulder blades was unfamiliar. He was used to wearing suits like these in the free fall of deep space, not in a planetary environment. He and his didn't check out planets that didn't have air that humans could breathe, as a rule.

Still, within a short while they were ready to go, and Meg had brought Sam up to date on the operation of the samplers she referred to as sieves. It was very simple. "They're not actually idiot-proof, though," she said wryly. "Took this guy – don't ask who, he transferred off and you don't know him – out with them, he nearly knocked me right over with the pole. Couldn't tell if he'd lost control of it or was just stupid, waving it about like that. It isn't a flag. Or a machete."

The sieves looked like butterfly nets on telescopic poles, with a variety of sensor equipment and samplers on the end where the nets should be. And yes, they did strain particulate matter out of the air, thus the name.

After a few minutes outside in the whirling black dust, wondering if he could actually feel the impacts of harder objects against his suit or if it was his imagination, Sam was beginning to sympathize with his nameless predecessor. The machines on the ends of the poles got heavy after the dust storm tried to whip it out of his hands at increasing and very erratic velocities. One minute the sieve was being yanked in circles as it got caught in an eddy. The next it was being whipped sharply to Sam's left as he struggled to hang on. He couldn't imagine how Meg was keeping hold of it.

He found out the hard way as he stumbled into her. She had the pole braced between her foot, the ground, and a big rock, holding it in place with her entire body. Waving her a clumsy salute of acknowledgement – subtle gestures weren't a strength of environmental suits, regardless of what environment they were in – he was about to move away when he heard her cry out through the suit communicators.

"Meg?" he called back. "You all right? Storm _lords_!" Sam didn't expect them to answer – he'd used up all his right to call on them back when _Gabriel_ had survived the heart of a shipkiller hurricane at flight speeds, and he wouldn't have traded that boon for all the blessings they could otherwise bestow and a painless jump to flight into the bargain – but it seemed appropriate.

Her suit must have ripped, or the seals malfunctioned and allowed the dust to find a crack. In any case, she was coughing and wheezing as black dust and any other crap that had gotten into her suit swirled around her helmet, concealing her face momentarily. It left her no choice but to breathe it in as the air filtration system struggled to keep up and – he realized he could hear it through the communicators – seized up, fans choking on the unexpected grit.

It was a bad sound, and Sam had spent too long in the airless environment of deep space to be blasé about the idea of anyone being deprived of air. He levered the sieve he was holding to the ground, caught hers as her grip faltered – she'd been hanging onto it to keep upright, a solution that wouldn't last very long in the rapidly changing winds – and did the same. Fortunately, she was small enough for him to drag back to the small airlock they'd come out of without much difficulty.

When they got there and had transitioned through both doors of the airlock, Dr. Mosley was already waiting for them, stripping off the young woman's helmet and checking her airways first of all.

"I'm fine!" Meg tried to insist hoarsely, pushing the doctor's hands away. She coughed, took one breath, then a deeper one. "See?"

She didn't look fine. There were leaves and broken-off bits of twig in her hair and fallen to the collar of her regular clothes, along with smaller flecks that might have been seeds or insect eggs or even little rocks for all Sam knew. Brushes of the blue pollen that the storm had shaken loose from the mountain forests and thrown to the four winds dusted her cheeks and dyed her hair.

"I'm breathing," she demonstrated. She was, but not well. "Thanks…Sam. Yuck!" Another round of coughing brought up blue-tinted spit and a leaf that had gotten into the back of her throat. She wiped both away. There was no trace of black dust, despite the fact that the stuff had been everywhere and Sam had clearly seen it inside her helmet. Or had he? Maybe he'd just seen it reflected on the surface of her helmet and gotten the perspective wrong. He'd been sure… But she certainly wasn't coughing any of it up as she continued to hack and heave. "Ugh. That was disgusting," she said in between bouts. "Let's not do it again."

"Agreed." Sam was happy to promise that. "What happened?"

Meg shrugged. For a moment it seemed awkward, but between half-disassembled envirosuit and disorientation and the deep breaths she was still, despite her protestations, struggling to draw, Sam didn't think that was anything out of the ordinary. "I've worn that suit before, in the last storm, the big one? I'll look after it better in the future. The seals are probably old, that's all. One of them broke. Surely that's not the end of the world?"

Sam would like to think not. At the moment he was just glad to be out of the dust storm. The survey team's unofficial name for it had been right on target. And these were regular features of the weather here?

Dr. Mosley insisted on taking Meg back to her sickbay for a full and thorough checkup despite the blonde woman's insistence that she didn't need anything of the kind. A moment after they rounded the corner, still arguing over each other in strong smooth accent and rasping coughs in turn, Sam almost began to wish he could take her place.

"_And just what was that stunt about?"_ _Gabriel_ demanded to know. _"I said 'don't worry about it', not 'go play in it'."_

"A change in the weather," said Sam.

* * *

_Now: Rogue_

For all that he'd wanted to get away from the unfamiliar and demanding humans protected within his hull, _Castiel_ found that it was a relief to be a part of a fleet again. It was one of his strongest instincts. _You are stronger together_, programming so basic it was fundamental to everything else told him, _this is your family_.

They dropped out of flight _en masse_. Where milliseconds ago there had been empty space, starships in mixed and contrasting shades of silver and grey and black with the occasional highlight of gold and brass and bronze transitioned into this universe, falling back below the speed of light without so much as a shudder.

Immediately – and when ships said _immediately_, they really meant it – the chatter of the nine starships' near-constant communications started up, embracing _Castiel_ and _Gabriel_ into the conversation automatically and inviting them to join in and tell them _everything_.

Keeping track of who was talking to whom and what they were talking about went beyond the human ability to describe, since ships could maintain multiple conversations simultaneously at incredible speeds.

_Naomi_ was glad to see that they'd done as they were told and stayed where they were, because she'd had her doubts that they would. _Balthazar_ was disgusted by the human wreckage still free-falling through the void. _Xanthir_ wanted to tell them all about the chaos that the attack had stirred up back in Sol system, drawing them into the argument she was having more or less constantly with _Cazul_ over whether or not sending a single patrol of ships like this would be enough and why _Michael_'s continuing push for more organization wasn't going to work. (He disagreed, and by their tones of voice and choices of words they weren't making any headway in finding middle ground.)

_Danael_ wanted news of her twin _Daniel_, who she'd heard that they'd briefly rendezvoused with a few days ago. _Laylahel_ was still amused by the fight her companion Jo had had with her mother Ellen when they'd been close enough to insist on joining this hunting party and Ellen had not wanted them to go. _Rochel_ was interested in the medical prognoses of the humans _Castiel_ and _Gabriel_ had rescued from the vacuum of space. _Karael_ and _Mitzrael_ wanted all the information they had about the weapons used to destroy the mining fleet.

It was chaos, a constant multilayered hum of discussion, conversation, debate, argument, speculation, observation, and commiseration. But it felt right, normal and welcoming. _Castiel_ enjoyed being human, to a significant degree, but this was his natural environment. Any plans to take off for the farthest star with the Winchesters and _Gabriel_ and leave everyone else behind were shelved in the comfort of being part of a Fleet again. He'd forgotten, too caught up in the suspicion that had fallen on their immediate family and the limitations they'd perceived as being placed on them and the stress of knowing that they had enemies on the loose, that he still belonged. The deeply social Fleet never abandoned their own if they could possibly avoid it.

The only exception in the past two hundred years were the ships of the dark Fleet, who had chosen to set themselves apart by becoming killers. That was a line the Fleet wouldn't cross, and the only other time the group had consciously rejected an individual member had been back in the very early days of their development, when an error with a much cruder version of their AI consciousnesses had created a mind with no regard for human life, which had killed experimentally, coldly and scientifically. Those earlier minds, which had only barely started to become ships, had unilaterally teamed up on their defective sibling and isolated it within its own mind – no connection to the outside universe at all. They had essentially smothered it.

No one was proud of that episode in their history, but in hundreds of years and hundreds of ships such a mistake had never happened again. Until now.

All the newly arrived ships had theories about where the barges that had vanished without a trace had gone, and what the dark Fleet might possibly want with them if they'd been the ones to take them. All the new arrivals were furious about the loss of life, and a little scared, but more angry than scared.

"I'm to take the survivors you have from you, I'm not staying," _Rochel _filled them in. "I've got pretty much an entire hospital's worth of medics and medical equipment with me. Let me get them up to speed and I can start bringing them over."

_Gabriel_ was pleased to hear it, in between the other conversations he had going. "That'd be good. We're not set up for disasters like this and neither are our boys—he said _what_? You're joking, _Xanthir_, you've got to be. _Michael_ said something that outrageous and I _missed it?_ I knew there had to be a downside to being light-years away from him, but until right now I didn't know what it could possibly—no, I'll talk about him like that all I want, _Naomi_, he doesn't like me any more than I like him and we both know it. If he needed your help to defend himself, why'd he send you out here?"

The closest human analogue would probably be standing in a room at a party trying to follow multiple conversations at once, only ships could really do what humans could only try to.

"I only want to go over this once," _Naomi_ said rather than arguing with _Gabriel_. "I'm sure you all have questions."

Variations on "So you're finally going to tell us what the plan is?" broke out in stereo.

"Wait, no one knows where we're going from here? No one at all?" demanded _Gabriel_ incredulously.

"Just _Naomi_," his younger sister _Mitzrael_ told him. "She's keeping secrets from us even though we volunteered to come out here and get shot at."

_Naomi_ went on, ignoring them, to say, "We should probably talk at human speeds for the moment so that our crews can listen as well."

They agreed to do so. It wasn't faster, but if you accepted her argument that there was no point in discussing their plan of action multiple times it was marginally more efficient. And since she had the plan she was nominally their leader.

"—don't even recognize a couple of those," Dean was saying as _Castiel_ returned his attention to being Cas. When he opened his eyes, the view was almost the same, if slightly narrower in scope because of the limited wavelengths that human eyes could perceive. All around him, the walls, including the ceiling and floor, of the Control Room displayed the newly arrived fleet, coasting slightly as they jockeyed for space in orbit well away from the damage the dark Fleet had done. The ships wouldn't risk a collision with a freefalling piece of debris if they could at all help it. Dean paced the room, tracking ships visually as they repositioned themselves into smoother orbits or veered away briefly to get a closer look at the wreckage on and around Rogue.

Readjusting to being human, _Castiel_ triggered the programming sequences that unplugged the human body from the energy links embedded beneath his shoulder blades. It felt intrusive and he didn't like it. Once the life-support unit had disengaged, however, he was quite content to sit on the edge of the chair and watch Dean move around the room.

"Wait, is that _Laylahel_? Jo's here? How'd she manage that? I figured Ellen would have her nailed to the floor by her hair in those secret research bases people are always saying the Fleet has somewhere."

"She tried," Cas told him dryly, "although I have no more information on semi-mythical secret bases than you do, Dean. As I understand it, Jo decided she wanted to come anyway."

"That's my girl," Dean said fondly before adding, "…don't tell her I said that. We're certainly going to have the edge on them if it's numbers that count. Wherever they've gone."

"_Naomi_ may have an idea about that. She hasn't said as much, but she suggested that she knows how to find _Zachariah_ and _Inias_, at least."

"Where—oh, I see her. Isn't she one of the ones always ragging on you?"

"She's loyal to _Michael_," Cas said, keeping his voice as neutral as possible. "She likes things to run smoothly."

"Man, is she in the wrong line of work. So have you got any hints on the plan?"

"_Rochel_ will be taking our casualties back to somewhere better equipped to deal with them."

"Good. Tell her _thank you_ lots. They need more help than you or I or Sam can muster up. Keeping 'em alive is about our limits, and –" His voice got dark. "– sometimes not even that." They'd permanently lost another handful of rescues to their injuries. Every death had hit Dean just that little bit harder. _Castiel_ suspected that his lover was taking each life lost as a personal failure.

Dean would not want to hear that it was not his fault that they had died. He wouldn't believe it. He'd change the subject, deny that he was feeling any such thing, get angry, make a joke, or just walk away.

Instead of trying to tell Dean any of this, Cas joined him at the window, resting a hand in the middle of his back. Not an embrace, not a restraining hand – just a touch. Just _here I am_, just _I want to be with you_.

The human stepped back into it, turned his head as if he wanted to say something, and then decided differently. "Tell her she can take them whenever she's ready. Oh – and maybe you should put out an all-points bulletin before they start dematerializing at random. I may not be a doctor, but I bet freaking out isn't medically advisable."

"I'll do that."

"And we are going after those killer sons of bitches, right? No more of this wait-and-see approach?"

"Yes, Dean. I believe so. _Naomi_ is waiting to tell us all what happens next."

"Right then. Put her on."

The panoramic displays of the Control Room came to life with a representation of the various people involved in _Naomi_'s briefing, replacing spacescape and starships with a virtual crowd that appeared to be trapped within the walls of the room, a mix of humans and ships' avatars, making the two species indistinguishable from each other unless the faces were familiar. Dean resisted the urge to try to move among them, approaching the people he knew and getting a feel for the people he didn't. It didn't work that way.

He did wave at Jo, however, who was tying her long blonde hair up in a rough ponytail. She grinned back at him. Despite the fact that they worked for her mother – despite the fact that _she_ worked for her mother – she and the Winchesters were great friends. They appreciated people who didn't pull punches, literally or metaphorically, and didn't tell more lies (to them) than they had to. Dean scanned the room, looking for anyone else, ship or human, that he knew.

Bela wasn't quite a friend – he would have bought her a drink in any bar standing, but only if it might knock her out of her poised glamour – but she was at least familiar. To Dean, Bela always looked like she was just waiting for an opportunity to look down on someone. She was infuriating to talk to (he thought) and impossible to deal with. She also had very sticky fingers, whether the things she took were valuable or not. Last time they'd met in person he'd had to find her again and almost literally shake her down to get back a music recording he'd picked up on El Dorado and had made the mistake of leaving in his jacket pocket while he was within arm's reach of her. Her ship partner _Balthazar_ was just as bad. If ever two people soundly deserved each other more, Dean couldn't recall them. Still, they were decent enough people if pushed hard enough.

A couple of other humans were familiar, and one or two of the ships. He'd run into Annie a couple of times. She was part of Bobby's network of people who were worth talking to, as long as you weren't easily offended, and could look after themselves if you dropped them in the middle of nowhere with a pocketknife and a mirror and nothing else. Dean had learned to trust Bobby's judgment of people.

He and Sam traded silent looks, speaking to each other in the subtle code of expressions and miniscule gestures that they'd developed over their lives. Sam was okay with this mix of people, he read off his brother's face. He wasn't avoiding looking at anyone or acting as if there was a threat in the room. Except _Naomi_, who was one of _Michael_'s primary lieutenants and could be ruthless and manipulative when she was determined to resolve something she saw as a problem. She considered herself the Fleet's fixer.

To the Winchesters and their ships, who got themselves in trouble with authority on a regular basis, she could not be considered a friend. She could make their lives very miserable if and when they ended up in her sights.

Unusually for a ship out beyond the Sol system's Oort cloud, she flew alone.

"We know the destruction we can all see was caused by two rogue ships of our Fleet," she led off her briefing. "We know who they were. We don't know why they destroyed these ships or what they want with the ones that they took with them."

She laced her fingers together, scanning her audience, many of whom were already fidgeting. Despite the fact that she projected herself standing, and that she wasn't very tall, she managed to give the impression of sitting behind a desk dictatorially. "This is unacceptable," _Naomi_ said sternly. "They are our family and we are responsible for them. They could have chosen to leave our space. We would have let them go. Instead they chose to kill and to kidnap. Fortunately, we were prepared for this."

Dean wasn't quite sure how the corpses burned black by cold falling out of the sky to impact with the ragged surface of Rogue added up to 'prepared' in _Naomi_'s mind. He considered saying so – and from the reactions some of the humans couldn't quite hide, he wasn't the only one thinking it – but Cas nudged his shoulder against Dean's ever so slightly where they stood together, close enough to touch but not so close that someone might draw conclusions. When Dean glanced over at him, Cas gave him a look that said _don't_ quite clearly.

"What I am about to tell you is a secret. It was not disclosed to the vast majority of humans and will not be. Not even the Fleet knows. We couldn't afford for the measures we took to be revealed to our enemies." She looked at everyone strictly. Reactions varied from confusion to suspicion to submission to her lecturing tone.

"We needed a way to track the activities of the ships referred to as the dark Fleet. We knew that if they intended to cause damage and chaos, then they would most likely attack other ships. Ships like us can be prepared, but human crafts were at risk. That was why the Fleet arranged for transmitters to be installed on every nonsentient ship that was repaired or serviced in the past six months."

_Naomi_ smiled. It wasn't a particularly happy expression, but it was satisfied. "We can track many of the spacecraft in service today. Including the ones they took from this world. This gives us a trail to follow when we leave here, as long as none of the rogue ships become aware of the signal. This is unlikely. We designed the signal to be intermittent, and on an extremely narrow-band frequency. The beacons are small and built into the ships' circuitry. Difficult to locate, and difficult to extract, but as long as they are still transmitting, we know the ship is still mostly intact. Hopefully we can retrieve the people and materials they have taken before they can kill anyone else or put them to use."

There was silence for a brief moment. _Naomi_ was clearly proud of her scheme, but no one else seemed quick to jump on board with it.

"_Any_ ship?" someone blurted out. Dean didn't see who, and he didn't recognize the voice. "Anywhere?"

"Not all, yet, no."

"Even _us_? What about us?" That was a dark-skinned woman with a scarf braided into her mess of hair who Dean recognized by her voice as the starship _Mitzrael_.

If _Naomi_ hesitated, she did so too briefly for human eyes to see. "No. You're expected to be able to protect yourselves. Human reflexes and machinery can't keep up with us, so their risk was greater."

"What frequency?" several people, mostly starships, asked, including _Gabriel_, _Balthazar_, and Jo's _Leylahel_. They didn't sound like they were eager to get on the hunt. They sounded more like they were going to double-check their hulls and systems for bugs immediately.

_Naomi_'s image glanced at them. She didn't quite roll her eyes – she was far too dignified for that – but the temptation was clearly there. "Here," she said, flicking a hand out to them as if offering something in the palm of her hand. The gesture must have been for the benefit of the humans and the maintenance of the illusion, since the ships could transmit information to each other without need of commentary.

Nine people who were actually ships went silent as they pored over the information and tried to make sure that they themselves weren't being tracked.

"When do we leave?" asked Sam into the suddenly tense quiet.

"As soon as the casualties are transferred to _Rochel_."

_Rochel_ chose that moment to insert herself into the conference. She'd been absent until then. For some reason, she'd chosen the appearance of a sleek brunette woman in an equally sleek long dress, complete with gloves up to her upper arms. She looked like she'd walked out of a black-and-white movie, or had dressed up to look as unlike someone serving as a hospital ship as possible. Evidently she had been monitoring the briefing without making an appearance. "Thing about that is, I've got a handful of people who don't want to go."

"What?"

The classy woman turned slightly to address Dean. "Maybe twenty or thirty, once they make up their minds. They're all on their feet and functioning, minimal damage. Either they got lucky or you're better medics than you all think you are. The consensus seems to be that they lost those boats, so they're going to go get them back."

_Naomi_ sighed. "This is a Fleet mission. We don't need them."

"Okay, boss," shrugged _Rochel_. The movement did interesting things to the dress she was wearing. Several people watched it move appreciatively. "But some of the more creative are arguing that when you catch up and get their ships back, you're going to need someone to fly them home."

"Why –" _Naomi_ cut herself off. "Fine. I don't care if they come with us. But only if they ask for passage. No one is obliged to accept them as passengers."

Dean waved a hand. "Ah, we un-volunteer." With everyone's attention on him, he put on his best wry grin and explained, "I've about reached my limit with the rescues and I'm not the only one. We're going to be cleaning up from them for a couple of days as it is." He didn't say that if they had to deal with any more strangers intruding on their family, someone was going to get dropped down an elevator shaft again, or worse. The ships were antsy – yes, that was the best word Dean could think of for it – and he and his brother were as bad.

And familiarity had let him see the tiny reactions on the features of his brother and their companions when _Naomi_ had announced that she could track ships remotely. They didn't believe for a second that the sentient ships were free of bugs. They needed to talk about this privately and no one would feel able to speak freely if they had guests.

He was suddenly really glad that they hadn't taken off running. That would only work if they couldn't be found and dragged back, and if they could be _tracked_…

_Naomi_ looked straight through him. Several people laughed. The Winchesters didn't exactly have a reputation for playing well with others.

"Say the word, and we're ready to go," Dean said hurriedly.

They set a departure time of an hour and a half later – well, _Naomi_ declared it and no one disagreed with her – and figures began disappearing from the screens of the Control Room as they closed off communications.

Dean lifted a hand slightly and twitched it in the classic cutthroat motion, signaling _Castiel_. A heartbeat later, the screens went blank completely before Sam and _Gabriel_ reappeared.

Sam put a finger to his lips and looked from Cas to _Gabriel_, a clear question in his eyes.

"They can't hear us," _Gabriel_ confirmed.

Immediately, Sam said, "Oh, damn. They can track us. They _are_ watching us!"

"You didn't believe that either, huh?" Dean scoffed grimly.

"No one believed her. You could see it. No wonder she wouldn't tell anyone her plan to find the dark Fleet until they got out here. There isn't even a beacon in this system anymore! We're completely cut off!"

"I'd forgotten that," muttered Dean. "I told you they were monitoring us."

"Yeah, yeah. You told us so." _Gabriel_ looked furious. "And not just us. Damn! I had no idea _Michael_'s crowd was so terrified."

"You think this is _Michael_'s idea?" asked Sam.

"If Naomi is involved, then he probably at least knows," Cas confirmed.

Dean growled at no one in particular. "Damn, I'm glad we didn't run for it. I'd much rather hunt than be hunted."

"Right," agreed Sam. "One thing at a time. Let's get those broken ships out of our skies first."

_Gabriel_ said something under his breath that made Sam laugh. Some inner devil dared him to ruffle his companion's reddish-gold hair and the smaller man yelped and swatted at the offending hands, glaring halfheartedly as Sam said, "Sorry, _Gabriel_. I know what you promised. It'll be all right. We're all together, aren't we? Nothing we can't do."

* * *

The ships picked up the trail just before their appointed time to leave. It was the faintest of blips in the background radiation of the universe, a flicker-fast, split-second, utterly inconsequential signal. If _Naomi_ hadn't told them what it meant, they would have ignored it.

"You're sure the ships hauling these barges around won't notice?" Dean checked with Cas. He could have asked _Naomi_, whose plan this was, but he didn't like her on Cas's behalf and he definitely didn't trust a word she said.

He and Cas were using the time to pack up and tidy away some of the debris left behind by the refugees' occupation of one cargo bay. They folded blankets, made stacks of discarded items, piled up medical equipment, tracked down squeeze bottles and flasks and dishes and trays, and generally tried to get the room into some sort of order. Dean thought it felt weird to see the evidence of so many people in this space. Now that they were gone, he let his possessive nature out of the box in his mind and heart where he'd locked it away over the past week. As far as Dean was concerned, _Castiel_ was his, body and soul, and having others in the space that should be his and driving _Castiel_ half mad with their needs and demands and appeals had set off that possessiveness and territoriality like a rocket. It had burned, and he'd tried to stomp it out with the reasonable argument that they were saving lives and their trespasses were temporary.

"Without looking for the signal, and without knowing its meaning," Cas explained, matching the human's movements as they folded away a large sheet that had been hung in between a part of the room set apart for medical use and the rest of the improvised living space, "the transmission is insignificant. Space is loud to us, Dean. You and many humans refer to it as 'the black', but to ships it is bright and colorful. We see the whole spectrum, and everything sings to us." He passed the folded sheet off to Dean and paused, trying to think of an example.

"Like this," said Cas, pointing. A hologram sprang to life against one wall. For a moment Dean didn't understand what he was being shown. It looked like the static of electromagnetic interference or of a transmission trying to receive something that hadn't been sent.

"I don't see anything."

"Precisely. Just noise. Could you notice a single pixel lighting up only every one point seven seconds, and then infer that a message was being sent through it?"

"Without knowing which one? There must be billions! Of course not, why would I…Oh, I see. That's what this tracking signal looks like to you?"

"Yes. We know which pixel to look for."

"And they don't. Okay." Dean thought this might be a good reason to ask something that had been bothering him. "So, you can see that signal. You can tell if one's coming from you as well, right? If they'd built in that tracker, you'd know now, since you know where to look."

Cas scowled at him. "Yes…if it is _that_ signal I was looking for. _Michael_ and his – _Gabriel_ calls them war hawks – are clever. Why should they use the same tracking device in us as they have in ships flown by humans?"

He gestured at the noisy, static-riddled hologram still flickering away against one wall like the screen of an antique and very broken television set. The crisp snap of the fingers he flicked at it was somewhat ruined by the fact that he had to transfer a crushed canister that might have once held water to his other hand to do it properly.

"Which signal do I look for, Dean? How do I know it when I've found it? What does it mean?"

The human wasn't surprised. "You think we're being watched too, don't you?"

"I'm almost certain of it. We're about to jump into flight. Be ready."

Dean put his back against a wall, bracing for the punched-in-the-chest feeling of transfer. "Don't get me wrong, Cas, I'm as ready to go after the dark Fleet as you are. But I hate this. I hate being watched and I hate that they did something to you that you didn't know about it. When we get back –"

He stopped, partly because he'd just had the breath knocked out of him and partly because he'd just seen Cas flinch at the words he'd used, ever so slightly. "What'd I say?"

"We are going back?"

A second's whirling thought put that into context. "Back to Earth? Yeah, I think we've got to now. Once this is over. Once we've gotten rid of _Samael_'s broken fleet once and for all. Whatever they think they're playing at.

"We're gonna close this case up nice and tight, Cas. Look around you. We've even called out the cavalry on our side this time, even if some of them do have a couple extra human passengers. The dark Fleet is outnumbered. Scattered. And they're toting around a bunch of barges."

"I wish we knew what they wanted with those," Cas commented. "I'm not worried about the dark Fleet, Dean. I've – we've – fought them before and we survived."

He stacked three abandoned pillows on top of each other, not meeting Dean's eyes. That in itself was a red flag, and Dean knew it.

"I wish this had never happened, Dean," the man who was the ship said suddenly. "I miss what we were before. We were happy, all together. I miss that. Can we ever get that back?"

Dean desperately wished he could say something more comforting than, "I don't know, Cas. I want to. We'll fight for it." But he wasn't going to lie.

They were just as broken as the dark Fleet, in their own ways.

Still, maybe hunting them down, proving their worth with everyone watching them, would help. If they didn't have to live with the fear and suspicion connected to that part of their past, then maybe…just maybe…they could be forgiven.

* * *

_to be continued_

* * *

**Author's Note:** This chapter, posted today, officially concludes NaNoWriMo, which this story was started in order to fulfill. I do intend to keep writing it, but at my own pace.


	8. Unforgiven

**Chapter Eight: Unforgiven**

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_Then: Shadow_

Despite their best efforts, the dust storm got everywhere, including inside the base camp ship. Over the six days it blew over the grasslands, keeping everyone indoors and building up enough of a static charge to interfere with just about everything, black dust snuck in through airlocks and on the surfaces of environmental suits when Meg bullied her climatology team out into the storm to take more readings and samples. It wore through a weakened point in the ship's hull and got into a vulnerable node of electronic circuitry, which created a domino effect as electricity shorted out and managed to develop a smoldering fire in a nearly inaccessible power junction. Black dust caught in the low flames burnt perfectly well, sending embers and sparks flying, lighting up the storm however briefly until they blew out in the raging wind.

Ultimately the eroded couplings and the fire knocked out power to a third of the ship in the middle of the night, so that tired and on-edge people who were beginning to develop the early stages of cabin fever woke up to a long walk to food or coffee or warmth or – after the granular black dust managed to travel through the wiring and migrate to other systems – working plumbing. This latest failure was only discovered after it was too late, of course.

Relocating their crewmates into a smaller and smaller space did nothing to improve the moods of the Shadow survey team.

"I can't believe they got through weeks of this," Sam said to _Gabriel_ as the former retreated from a room containing, primarily, two people playing a lethally intense game of pool who had not wanted more company. The atmosphere had not been improved by the kibitzers betting on their every move and cat-calling each other. Battle lines hadn't yet been drawn, but when they were blood might be shed.

The starship was sulking, just a bit. He'd been watching the spectacle through Sam's goggles and had wanted to see the end of the game, up to and including violence. Sam wasn't particularly surprised when he didn't reply, but he was a bit annoyed. With the storm overhead, it seemed like no one else wanted to talk to him. Sam didn't appreciate the cold shoulder and was determined not to let it get to him. Which meant ignoring people who were ignoring him.

Which left him with very few people out of Dean, _Gabriel_, and _Castiel_ to talk to. And Dean had chosen to deal with the blackout, or possibly the boredom that arose by comparison with having nothing to chase down through unfamiliar and challenging territory, by setting up a camp for himself in _Baby_'s shuttlebay and not coming out for just about anything.

It was almost like being out trailblazing again, but without the view, the fresh air, the stimulating physical activity that was surviving solo miles from Dean and light-years from the rest of humanity, the mental challenge of confronting an entirely new planet, or the sunlight. Without most of the appeal, in short.

"They're probably all hoping that doesn't happen again," Sam continued his thought. He ignored the look he got from the other occupant of the hall, who was carrying a bowl of ice cream. Probably escaping the mess hall before duels erupted over the dishes. She had the right idea. At least the food replicators were working. If those went down next Sam was taking his chances with the dust and going for a walk with a tent and a shotgun until they were repaired. "Are you even listening to me?"

"_You seem to be doing fine on your own."_

"I'm bored, _Gabriel_, no one will talk to me. Did I put on a monster mask this morning in the dark or something? Am I wearing the wrong color? I mean, what did I do?"

"_I offered to bring you back up here instead. You said no."_

"Is that what this is about?" Sam asked incredulously. "That doesn't cover everyone else, but is that why you're being so quiet for a change? Because you offered to take me away from all this and I said no?"

"_No,"_ said _Gabriel_, but Sam didn't believe him.

"I stayed on the surface to help, _Gabriel_. At some point I might have to break up fights, if this keeps up." Storm lords, Sam thought suddenly, _Gabriel _was lonely too. While there was a relay in orbit that would put him in contact with the rest of the Fleet, albeit with a slight delay, _Gabriel_ and _Castiel_ had both dropped enough hints that, combined with what Sam had seen of the Sol system before they'd been hustled out of sight, that no one was talking to _Gabriel_ either. Especially since Sam would bet that long-gone girl's bowl of ice cream that Cas was focusing on Dean.

"Why don't you come down here instead and keep me company? I'd like that." Sam was shocked to realize that he meant it. Usually inviting _Gabriel_ to anything meant havoc, chaos, and destruction, liberally garnished with chocolate or, on one notable occasion, whipped cream, and yes, literally. Sam was holding standing threats of evisceration and/or being beaten to death with a cardboard box over any of his family who ever mentioned that incident ever again, for any reason, to anyone. It didn't help that Bobby knew about it too. There were probably pictures, which Sam would have to burn if he ever got his hands on.

"_Can't,"_ the starship admitted reluctantly. _"The dust storm is interfering with my sensors; transporters are shot. I can barely see that lump of metal and circuitry you're calling base camp. Otherwise I would have just brought you home anyway."_

"Gee, thanks for consulting me," Sam said sarcastically, knowing as he did that he was outmatched in that department.

"This is the best I can do right now." _Gabriel_'s holographic avatar fizzled into visibility beside Sam, looking everywhere but at the human.

"Then that'll have to do. Want to go back and see if those two are killing each other with the pool cues yet?"

They did, with _Gabriel_ looking bloodthirstily eager at the prospect, but the game ended peacefully enough, although there were some resentful glares as half of the bettors paid up, trading a mixed assortment of favors, duties, privileges, and promises rather than any sort of currency.

"It's funny," Sam mused aloud, as the room cleared and left the two of them alone again. "Locked in with these people, I'm starting to see things about them I never would have guessed. I don't know whether it's just that I never spotted it before or if the confinement is changing them."

"Like what?" The starship's avatar had retrieved the pool balls from where they were stored and was now sitting on one end of the table rolling them into each other according to no particular set of rules that Sam could make out. The object didn't seem to be to get them into the holes, since every time one fell in _Gabriel_ would pull it back out and send it spinning again, flickering from place to place on the table's surface. Maybe it was to make as much noise as possible. The processing power that _Gabriel_ had access to, as a starship, made him a terrifyingly good shot, however. One particularly creative sequence had sent every ball on the table rolling frantically, and most of them had ended up in one pocket or another, except – and that was how Sam had known it was deliberate – the infamous black eight ball.

Sam did his level best to ignore the chaos. "A couple days ago, I was down in the sickbay looking for Meg – careful!" A purple pool ball suddenly acquired too much momentum and bounced away across the room, too close to Sam for his liking. He picked it up and, against his better judgment, tossed it back to _Gabriel_, who caught it and returned it to the traditionally green felted surface, however temporarily.

"And Dr. Mosley had checked her out and said she was okay, so she was just leaving. She pushed past me like I wasn't even there, like we were strangers. I followed after her, trying to say I was glad she was alright, but she just snapped at me that she was busy and had things to do. Not even a smile."

"So? She's a climatologist in the middle of a storm. Of course she's got work to do."

"It's not that. It was the way she looked at me. Like she barely knew who I was. And it's not just her. Everyone who went out to fix that blown-out power coupling came back unfriendly. A bunch of people from the area that lost power are acting really off."

_Gabriel_ watched him curiously, skeptically. "Even I heard some of the curses after the power went out. They're unhappy, that's all." Reacting to the glare Sam shot him, he parried, "What's your theory, then?"

"I don't have one. I just know something's wrong. People stop talking when I come into the room. There are people here I'd have almost called friends, except ever since the power went out and that black dust started getting tracked everywhere they've gone cold. I always felt like I was being watched, ever since we got back, but now it's like everyone's talking behind my back. I don't know what I did – I don't know what they're doing." His vaguely puzzled look dropped into a deep scowl. "Apart from the obvious. I thought we were getting away from the rumor."

"Isn't that," denied _Gabriel_. "I've been watching everything that comes through the relay – don't tell; I'm not supposed to. No one asking or being told about what happened to us. Other than that…pretty vague. Your brother spotted anything?"

Sam smiled despite himself. "That's not a secret, everyone know you and your family snoop on the network. But I won't tell anyone. And I don't think Dean's done anything but fix that shuttlecraft since the storm started. Think Cas has been with him most of the time, though. You could ask and see if he's mentioned it."

_Gabriel_ tapped two pool balls together, maybe for the noise or something to do with his hands in the miniscule amounts of time it took the two starships to compare notes. "Nope. Not a thing. Cas says they didn't see many people anyway before the dust blew up."

"Guess I'll have to run it by him in person, then," Sam decided. "It won't hurt him to take a break and think about something else for a bit. Leave those alone, would you? Whatever you're trying to do with them, I'm sure you can model it just as easily."

"Not as much fun as doing things for real. My imagination's good, but reality does weird things sometimes. And we play games like this on a much smaller scale, with atoms rather than pool balls, bouncing them around and trying to predict where they'll go. It's not as easy as it sounds, even for us. Every so often one of us gets the same old mad idea about subatomic particles knowing that we're looking at them and deciding to do things. Is it really all that everywhere?" he asked as he followed Sam down the corridor, and clarified, "The dust."

"Oh." Sam thought about it. That was a safer topic than the way the starships saw quantum physics. "Not so much, I guess, but it gets around. People track it around on their boots, and I'm tired of seeing it in new places. I guess you could say the surveyors are acting a bit like little kids. They've got nothing to do – but they don't want to clean their room."

"You don't clean yours."

"That's different, I don't have to. And you mess up my stuff anyway, so why would I bother?"

When they reached the small shuttlebay that had been set apart for Dean's repair project, Sam had to stop in the doorway for a moment, impressed.

The first time he'd been down here, _Baby_ had just been transported in. She'd been a wreck. There had been holes in her hull so severe that it had looked like something with old-fashioned airplane propellers for teeth had been at her. Where the hull hadn't been penetrated, it had been deeply scored. The entire stern section had been caved in so drastically that Sam had been able to reach out from the shuttle's cockpit and touch points on the back wall, or what was left of it. Her black paint coat had been scraped away to reveal the muddy grey metal of the shuttle's hull. Something (they'd never found out just what) had gutted her, tearing a deep gash through _Baby_'s undercarriage and ripping through hull metal and electronic systems alike.

The forward viewscreen, which wrapped around the entire front third of the shuttle, had been starred with cracked spiders' webs. At some point between the damage being incurred and _Baby_'s arrival on Shadow's surface, pieces of the transparent material had fallen out and been lost completely. Understandably: they'd been running hard and traveling rough. The top of the shuttle had been scorched by an antimatter missile that had exploded just above it, and the metal had been heated to such a temperature, however briefly, that it had actually melted slightly even in the cold of the Beneath. One of the stabilizer fins that jutted out on either side of the shuttle, like wings, had been sheared off completely, while the other had been punched in and crumpled like it had been made of paper.

Sam and Dean had both been aboard at the time. They'd been lucky to survive. But _Baby_ had looked like she would never fly again.

"Whaddya think, Sammy?" Dean hailed them cheerfully now.

Sam was at a loss for words, but only for a second. "She looks beautiful, Dean."

She did.

The shuttle was completely in one piece again. Her hull was smooth and unbroken, without dents or tears or so much as a scuff. The missing stabilizer fin had been replaced, and the broken one either replaced or repaired. Sam couldn't tell the difference at a glance. They both looked new. The entire shuttle looked new – almost – which was quite an achievement considering that she'd been outdated when Dean had acquired her in the first place.

Dean had been sitting on the shuttle's nose when Sam and _Gabriel_ had come in, talking to Cas, who appeared to be sprawled out on _Baby_'s roof, lying on his stomach with his chin in his hands, watching Dean talk and possibly not listening to a word he was actually saying.

What space in the bay wasn't occupied by his brother's _Baby_ shuttlecraft – she was comparatively large, for a ground-to-orbit two-person shuttle – was littered with pieces of scrap metal, machines that Dean had only been able to get his hands on through their near-familial relationship with Bobby and more than a few promises (on his side) and threats (on Bobby's), and the evidence that Dean really hadn't left the bay for more than a few minutes a day, including food wrappers, bottles that had had liquid in them at one point, and a disarrayed nest made mostly of blankets, sleeping bags, and pillows.

If he hadn't seen the wreckage – he hadn't been awake for the impact, and Sam was often glad of that – he wouldn't have ever known the shuttle had ever been anything but pristine.

Except for – "Needs repainting, though."

"I know," Dean complained, self-satisfied and proud expression shifting into one of vague irritation. "Didn't bring the spray-painters along when I set up shop in here, and Cas says there's a storm overhead so he can't transport them down?"

"It's been blowing for four days, Dean. Have you really not noticed?"

"Been busy."

"I can see that." Sam walked around the shuttle as he spoke, calling back to his brother as he trailed a hand across the restored hull. Bits of paint flaked off at the edges between the remaining glossy coat and where it had been scraped off through damage or repairs. "But a major dust storm blew down from the mountains a few days ago and it does seem to interfere with transporters."

"Figured as much. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this." Dean reached up and waved his hand straight _through_ Cas, whose image flickered and then restored itself.

"I did explain, Dean," Cas said patiently, undisturbed by the interference. It probably wasn't the first time.

"Was I listening?"

"You may have been falling asleep at the time."

Dean squinted at the middle difference as he tried to remember. "Oh yeah. You told me to get some sleep before I hurt myself and I was complaining about sleeping alone."

No one in the room so much as twitched. This was family. Besides, even people who didn't know for sure that Dean and Cas were sleeping together tended to assume that they were after watching them stare at each other and stand too close for a while.

"You must have been working flat out to do this much," Sam said instead, completing his circuit of the shuttle. "You testing out the hull or are you going to budge up?"

Dean moved over and let his brother join him on the shuttle's nose. Between the two of them, they pretty much filled the available space.

"Pretty much," Dean agreed, grinning. "Knew I could fix her."

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam noticed that _Gabriel_ had reappeared on the shuttle's roof and was entertaining himself by displacing Cas. Cas was looking at him much as one looks at a pushy cat whose presence, however entertaining, is not making one's task easier. Sam had worn that look too often to not recognize it on Cas's face.

"Once the storm blows over, you want to help repaint her?"

Sam grinned. That sounded like fun. "You brought two spray painters?"

"Four!" _Gabriel_ insisted. "I want to help and Cas does too."

"You want to cause havoc and destruction with a spray painter," corrected Sam.

"Well, yeah. But this little boat first. Then havoc and destruction. And chaos. And confusion and maybe screaming."

Dean was laughing. "Have we got four spray painters, Cas?"

"No. We have one, and a spare. I can take the two we have apart and assemble two more, if you really think it's at all advisable to give _Gabriel_ a way to cover things in paint." From the sound of his voice, _Castiel_ didn't think it was advisable in any way.

"If you don't, I'll bring my own." _Gabriel_ sounded like he was only barely refraining from adding _so there._

"Fine! But if I catch you deliberately getting paint on anything but _Baby_, I'm going to come after you with a baseball bat, you hear?"

_Gabriel_ maturely and reasonably resorted to pulling a face, complete with stuck-out tongue, at him. Cas leapt to Dean's defense by pushing his older brother off the shuttle's roof, which shouldn't have worked except that _Castiel_ had managed to hack into the holographic signal to do it. _Gabriel_ blinked out before the image hit the ground, reappeared in midair, stayed there, and yelped, "Sam!"

"You started it." Thoroughly entertained, Sam refused to help. "I'll refrain from saying _I told you so_. At least for today."

"I should have kept ignoring you," _Gabriel_ huffed, and suited actions to words theatrically.

Which reminded Sam. "Everyone else is. It's weird," he explained to Dean. "Since this storm started, it's like I don't know anyone anymore. I can name seven or eight people who aren't acting at all like themselves, and maybe half a dozen more I don't know the names of to begin with. They look at me like I'm not worth talking to. You seen anything like that lately?"

Dean shrugged. "I've been here, Sammy. I think Rufus was in here…"

"Yesterday," Cas filled in for him.

"Really? I thought it was longer ago that that."

"Early yesterday."

"Oh. I pulled a couple all-nighters, lost track of time. And then before that, I think Krissy came to watch for a few minutes." Dean laughed. "I was doing some detailed rewiring work rather than running around without a shirt on. Maybe she got bored."

Sam pushed him towards the slope of the shuttle's nose just on principle, since that was obviously the proper response to obnoxiousness today, but his heart wasn't in it. Instead, he sighed, hypothesis suffering under lack of data. "Maybe I'm just getting paranoid, locked up with all these people. Or maybe it's just cabin fever and they'll be themselves once they're under the sun again and we don't have to worry about dust leaking in all the time."

"Dust?"

"Don't ask."

"Okay, I won't then. Any predictions on when it'll blow over?" This was addressed to everyone, ships and humans alike.

"Meg told me the last one stayed for weeks."

"Ugh," was Dean's observation on that. "After that long without an open sky, I'd get bitchy too. Flying back in doesn't count." He meant back from one of their long flights out into unknown territory; they had often made straight shots back to Earth without stopping.

"We don't know how long it will last," Cas told him evenly. "It –"

"– interferes with your sensors, yeah, I heard you the first time, Cas. Well, the second time. Give me a couple minutes to clean up, Sammy, and we'll go rattle some cages."

"Just like that?"

"Sure," said Dean. He sounded surprised. "You say something's screwy around here, I believe you, man."

There were days Sam loved his brother unconditionally. This was evidently one of them.

* * *

_Now: In Flight_

Dean was a hunter, a survivor, and sitting by while others worked without him drove him crazy. As long as he felt he was involved in some way, he felt better.

Accommodatingly, _Castiel_ had translated the signal the fleet of starships was following on what seemed like a random course. He'd turned it into an intermittent beeping sound that changed modulation, tone, and volume depending on how clearly the ship had picked up the tracking signal and what had interfered with it. Since the list of candidates included every star in the sky, as well as stray signals from the further-out colonies, both of which occasionally made their way into flight space, and the natural background noise of that space to boot, it wasn't an easy task. The sound sometimes faded away altogether, and other times slid up and down the scale in agonizingly long intervals.

Despite the fact that no one knew how long it would take them to catch up with the source of the signal, one – or possibly more, _Naomi_ had not been forthcoming about that little detail – of the hijacked and secretly bugged ships, Dean had taken to pacing the hallways listening to the translated sound as if he could hear something in it that the entire fleet couldn't, as if he could track it to its source in the corridors and passageways of his private world.

He'd started quite by accident, following _Castiel_'s directions to yet another room that the refugees, now gone, had been billeted in. They were tidying up one room at a time, but it seemed to Dean as if the abandoned rooms – the word that kept occurring to him was _defiled_, and Dean was trying to get that possessive, jealous instinct under control – may as well have been multiplying. Had there really been that freakin' many of the wounded, traumatized strangers?

"Yes, Dean," Cas reiterated patiently when Dean put this question to him. "We really saved that freakin' many of them."

As usual when Cas mimicked Dean's turns of phrase, the human was more caught by the words than their meaning at first, and it was only once he'd managed to erase the sound of it from his immediate memory that what the ship had actually said made its way to the forefront of his attention.

That was a good thing, Dean reassured himself, knowing even as he did that Cas had been trying to tell him that for days now. The corpse rattle of _my fault my fault my fault_ hadn't gone away, and maybe it never would; it had just been pushed to one side by the presence of ships and Fleet crew in the immediate area. They were still more people, and not all people Dean knew or trusted, but at least they were more _his_ people than the mining crews had been.

Regardless, he had been heading back to his familiar rooms, leaving a once-again orderly space behind him, when he had been seized with the impulse to return another way. Alone – but never really alone – he'd wandered the empty corridors aimlessly, passing doors he'd never entered and hallways he hadn't been down in years, if ever. At some point his pacing had become a trot, then a loping run. Running for no reason, to nowhere.

Even today, Dean hadn't been able to make up his mind whether he had been running away from everyone else or chasing the monsters his _Castiel_ was hunting. It couldn't be both, surely.

In any case, when he'd tired of going nowhere, he'd made his way back to his rooms – some part of him had noted his route and kept an accurate mental map, old habits and learned reflexes coming into play even here – he'd asked Cas, who had been waiting for him in his rooms patiently, what the signal sounded like.

That had been two days ago and he was already dreaming about it. The sound was like a lifeline. It was a little spark of light, a scent in the air. A silver string between now and the future that he could follow.

It was just there, at the end of that thread that was leading them to confront their nightmares, to exorcise the ghosts that haunted his family and howled in their dreams and silences: it led not only to the broken but dangerous remnants of the dark Fleet, but _through_ them.

He told this to Sam in what felt like very late one ships' night. He'd been too restless to sleep and was sitting on the end of his bed stripping down, repairing, and cleaning every piece of survival equipment he owned and that Cas could find, one by one. It was the closest he could get to peace these days. Something to do with his hands, eyes, and mind. His lover beside him, silent but present. The complex but familiar sounds of the hybrid electronic and acoustic music from Old Earth he liked best, turned down to background because Sam was on the other end of the dedicated line and Sam wasn't quite as fond of it as Dean was. His brother and his friend nearby and safe –just for now, that was all he asked. They lived their lives that way, prying the next day away from the future one at a time. _Just one,_ he thought they'd been saying all their lives, _just this one, and we'll worry about the next one next time_.

"_I like that,"_ said Sam, heaving a sigh. _"That's a way out."_

"A light at the end," Dean said suddenly, not knowing where the phrase came from. Straight out of the book of clichés, he thought disgustedly.

"_A beep, anyway,"_ Sam teased him softly. _"Maybe I'll try that, _Gabriel_, can I hear what he's hearing or is it a very bad idea to ask you for noise?"_

"_Probably a bad idea,"_ Dean heard _Gabriel_ volley back, _"but sure."_

"_No sirens,"_ insisted Sam.

"_None at all? Not even one?"_

Very quietly, for Dean's ears only, Cas murmured, "He won't. You know Sam's having nightmares?"

Dean wrapped his free hand around a tent pole that wouldn't telescope in properly and squeezed it as hard as he could until it left tracks in his hand. "Yeah. Figured it out on Shadow."

"He's doing better, since we left there."

That was the best news Dean had heard all day. "Really? He didn't tell me that. How'd you know?"

He could _feel_ Cas smile, that very small but utterly sincere curve of lips against his skin. "_Gabriel_ adores him really. He just doesn't want anyone to know. He doesn't want Sam to have nightmares any more than you do, and he is looking after your brother, I promise."

"See?" Dean replied, "Now you're the one teasing. I told you so."

* * *

Almost as soon as they'd met up in orbit of Rogue, Jo Harvelle had called both Winchester brothers and warned them that she hadn't seen them in _ages_ and they were going to have a good long get-together once they were underway or, as she'd put it, this circus gets its acts together.

Ships played well with each other; they just didn't move in a straight line very well. Maybe if they'd had a strong leader from the beginning, who might have demanded more discipline and at least a semblance of order, but left to themselves they fractured and quarreled and generally went in more directions than whole kennels' worth of hyperactive puppies in orbital free fall ever could. In this case, they were mostly listening to _Naomi_, and in any case this was a volunteer fleet, but it took them some time before they got around to coordinating social visits for their crews, no matter how quickly ships could think.

"This is a great idea," Jo declared enthusiastically once her _Laylahel_ and the Winchesters' ships had synchronized the communication channels and holoprojectors together and created almost a virtual reality aboard each starship so that each human was interacting freely with two others who weren't really there. She was wearing her true blonde hair down today, with nothing around likely to pull on it. "Can I hug you?"

She tried it on Dean, who shuddered involuntarily as holographic skin prickled. It was probably having the same effect on her, but she seemed willing to live with it for brief periods of hug. "I can! Great!" Sam got the same treatment. She looked around the room, whatever room she was seeing, for ships' avatars that hadn't materialized and called out, "Cas, _Gabriel_, hi!" Just about everyone who liked them had picked up the nickname Dean used almost invariably.

Formalities over, she demanded, "What the hell have you all been _doing_? Are you all right?"

"Oh, no," Dean groaned, meaning every word. "Not you too. We got asked that far too many times back on Earth, Jo. No more."

"Did you _answer?_ Did you even think about the question or did you just – no, wait, let me guess, you're 'fine'." Clearly only a heroic effort of will and the fact that the gesture looked very silly and had always done on just about everyone stopped her from throwing out air quotes around the last word. In an effort to stop herself from doing so, she jammed her hands onto her hips and glared at both brothers. "Is that an acronym by now? Like 'FUBAR'?"

She looked exactly like her mother when she did that at them. Neither of them dared to tell her so. Not for anything. Jo was just about family; she was part of their circle of friends back on and around Launch Station and she occupied a nebulous region in their mental maps of the world, shared by Charlie, labeled 'sister-like'. Admittedly she was a little sister who could out-cheat them at poker and out-play them fairly at shooting games, sleight-of-hand her way out of drinking contests and laugh at the poor sucker who had drunk himself under the table trying to keep up with her in a race only he was running, or run and fight shoulder to shoulder in mud and muck with grown men a foot or more taller than her. She also punched alarmingly hard.

The Winchesters liked her a lot.

They didn't see her much – she and her soft-spoken _Laylahel_ ran a certain caliber of messages, which couldn't be trusted to a relay system that ships snooped on regularly and gossiped about pathologically, from world to world, along with equally high-security items and, according to rumor, people to match. Something of the way the woman and the ship interacted may have encouraged the Fleet to put up with the seemingly mismatched bond between Dean and _Castiel_; if he ever found out that that was true Dean would be forever grateful to her…and never, ever say so, of course.

Every time they did manage to meet up, they always had months of stories to trade.

"We're doing all right, Jo," Sam tried to placate her.

"More so if people would stop asking us that," Dean muttered, and added, slightly louder, "We just want to finish what we started, okay?"

"What you –"

"This," he elaborated, gesturing broadly at essentially everything. In the back of his attention, the signal they were following hummed through the room, unusually clearly. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at it. "That. We ran into those monsters, so they were our problem. And if they'd stayed out in the dark that would have been that, but they didn't. They came back. Now I know we couldn't have done any differently, but it feels like unfinished business, tracking them like this, and I hate unfinished business. It always comes back to bite us. And I know there's a fair amount of shoot-the-messenger going on. You can't tell me people – humans and ships – aren't acting like we're going to go crazy like it's catching, what those monsters are like. We were _quarantined_, Jo, sent away like we had rabies. It's been months, and the Fleet's still flyin' wide around us."

Dean had found that out a day into this flight, because he knew the way _Castiel_ usually behaved on the rare occasions that the human had flown as part of a fleet with him. _Castiel_ wanted to be on good terms with his brothers and sisters. Before, he would have kept up a running commentary, like a military commander assessing the troops and the territory around him for a trusted comrade, sharing what he'd learned from them and what his Fleet family had done with Dean, who was half of his human family.

This time, he'd been all but silent. Dean had assumed that no one was talking to him, and, when pushed, Cas had unenthusiastically admitted that his siblings were less ready to speak freely to him and _Gabriel_ than they had been in the past. "They're watching what they say," had been the way he'd put it.

The human blamed the dark Fleet, however much of it was left. If it had been him, his choice and his hands, Dean would have killed all the creatures that had tried to kill his family. To him they'd been the monsters he was calling them on a regular basis now. They'd attacked the people he loved, and to Dean that was as personal as an attack on his own person, worthy of the same retaliation, and more so, for the same reasons. That was who he was.

But it hadn't been on him. Those deaths would have been on Cas, Cas who still grieved for the mad sister _Anna_ he'd killed in the Beneath. He wouldn't have been able to fight them all to the death, in part because it would have broken him to do so.

Dean was never again going to ask that of Cas. He wouldn't do it.

Still, he knew that he wouldn't have to ask, if it came down to it sometime soon, when they followed the signal to its source and caught up. He knew Cas would kill to protect him.

"We just want to end it proper and put everything back the way it should be," he said stubbornly.

"Did anyone at all tell you it wasn't your fault that people died? That none of this is?" Jo shifted her weight slightly. Dean only noticed because he'd asked her about it once. She had long since talked _Laylahel_ into letting her feel more of the currents, eddies, and irregularities of flight than most people liked. Jo was one of the people who could jump into flight aboard a ship without any side effects at all. She liked it there, and had confessed that she loved feeling the movements as if she was aboard a tall ship on some wide and empty ocean. She'd then promised to hit him if he ever told anyone, but Dean had decided that no reasonable person could expect that prohibition to include Sam and had told his brother about it anyway.

"_They never believe that,"_ said _Castiel_ unexpectedly, without bothering to materialize in any way.

"Hey, Cas," Jo replied easily. "I know they don't believe it. But we gotta keep telling 'em, right? I don't know why you put up with them sometimes."

She sighed and rolled her eyes up at the ceiling simultaneously, again tempting the brothers to tell her how much she looked like her mother the admiral. "Look, let me just say one thing and then I promise to drop it, okay?"

"Deal," Dean responded instantly. "If it's a _short_ one thing."

"Fine. It's just that you're not alone, you hear me? This whole messed-up situation that's making soldiers out of you and everyone back home so that Mom has to go to more meetings than –" Metaphors briefly failed her. "– some sort of meeting-going person. It's not your fault and we're going to fix it. It's not just on you."

"Thanks, Jo, but –" Sam's voice was bitter, and he was quickly interrupted.

"Nope! Don't want to hear it. I get the last word. Dean said so."

"I did not!"

"_Yes, you did,"_ said at least three people in a ragged chorus – four, Dean realized, hearing _Laylahel_'s voice in the mix with Jo, _Gabriel_, and _Castiel_.

"You really did, you know," Sam admitted.

"Shut up."

Jo laughed at him, breaking the mood for good. "Okay, I'll put you out of your misery, Dean, I know none of you want to talk about this." She said something inaudible under her breath that no one except perhaps _Laylahel_ caught.

They chatted about nothing very much for a while: the antics of friends they'd seen in passing, amusing incidents that had happened to them that were worth sharing and some that weren't, ideas about where to find various valued things and which colonies were producing what these days, the last – well, the most recent – prank Ash had pulled on Jo and how much _Gabriel_ was not allowed to steal that idea _("He got that one from _me_!"_ _Gabriel_ had countered proudly) until the conversation worked its way around to Jo's remark that "So we've got a handful of your refugees along, did you know?"

"Yeah?" Sam encouraged her. "How's that working out?"

She screwed up her face uncertainly. "It's _weird_, having them around! We move people sometimes, you know that, but usually they just stay in their cabins and read paperwork or whatever it is they do. These people…" She shrugged, as if trying to dislodge something from between her shoulder blades. "I feel watched all the time! And not like when Layla's watching over me, you know what that's like and it's a good feeling, right? A protected watched feeling. But this is like they're _staring_ at me all the time, even when it's just me in a room. And it's not just me, Layla feels it too.

"Layla says they're angry and on alert all the time, and that's what I'm feeling," she explained. It wasn't unusual for Jo, the pushier personality of the two of them, to speak for the ship. Like Dean, and occasionally Sam, she often elided her partner's name into something quicker and affectionate. "They're nice enough – they don't want to talk to me and they definitely don't want to talk to Layla; they ignore her completely. I wish we hadn't brought them with us, sometimes."

"We got that," said Sam. "Maybe we should practice dealing with regular humans more, not just Fleet people who are used to ships that talk."

"Most of us do, you know," Jo told him. "It's just people like you lot, the trailblazers and the anomaly hunters and the deep sweepers, who lose the knack for it." She'd used a term for the occasional working team who took a fancy for just pointing their noses in one random direction and keeping approximately to that course until they got bored and came back. Deep sweepers came back with either nothing or treasure, although mostly nothing, and were generally considered to be even weirder than trailblazers or the ships that went out investigating strange signals and suspected deep-space anomalies. They weren't just loners and misfits like the Winchesters and their partners, they were idealists and mad-eyed dreamers. There were always a few, scattered out over the history of the Fleet.

"I know you're good at it, but I still can't see how you don't get lonely out there on your own."

"We've got each other." Sam's tone was mild and deliberately not as defensive as he felt.

"I know that," Jo said, with a sigh. "Just remember the rest of us like you too, got it?"

"Hey," said Dean, half-seriously, "did you get the last word on that or not?"

"_If anyone's interested,"_ interrupted _Gabriel_, _"we think we've got a bearing on where we're going."_

"You do? Hell yeah, we're interested! C'mon, share!" Dean knew perfectly well that travel in flight wasn't a matter of drawing a straight line between departure and destination, not with the weather and currents that this dimension experienced. Ripples and eddies in the environment here, gusts and gales and full-blown storms that ran the gamut from the equivalent of small quick whirls to shipkiller hurricanes, currents that carried a ship faster than the energy it was putting out or held it back as it fought the slipstream – all made navigating in flight a phenomenally complex task. There was a reason it took so many humans to fly a single barge.

And they'd been tracking a faint and intermittent signal, not much more than the proverbial breadcrumbs blowing about in the weather of this place, tiny flashes of light refracting around and away.

Only now had they assembled enough dots to connect them and extrapolate, assuming their targets didn't know they were being tracked.

If they did, that changed everything and they were, in all probability, flying into a trap. That would be bad.

"So what's in front of us?" Sam started to ask, but was interrupted by _Castiel_'s voice saying to apparently no one, so probably everyone,

"_Wait, I don't understand, we're not supposed to…"_

"Cas?" Dean said, not liking that tone. _Castiel_ sounded confused and reluctant with a growing edge of anger at the confusion, all at once. If he'd been a dog, he would have been crouching, ears back and down, as if he was being sent somewhere he knew he wasn't supposed to go by someone he knew he was supposed to obey, which, they found out, was essentially what was going on.

"_Why should we go there? We're not supposed to go there."_

"Cas! What's going on?"

"You heard of a place out here called the Coal Sack?" _Gabriel_ interrupted, materializing so close to Sam that he was going to get stepped on by accident. He must have been there all along without bothering to project his image into the conversation, because he reached out absently and wound his fingers around Sam's wrist, monitoring his pulse habitually. Sam didn't seem to notice, so it must have been the human avatar and not a hologram. Meanwhile, _Castiel_ continued to protest to whoever was listening and _Laylahel_ took up the refrain with him.

"Yeah," said Sam, looking down at his friend and letting _Gabriel_ keep the hand he had hold of. "Big dark dust cloud out…this way, if I've still got my bearings right. We've never been there. There probably aren't any inhabitable planets inside it; they'll all be too young to have developed life if there even are any rocks with solid surfaces. So it's not been of interest, not to us."

That was a crude description. Earth-based astronomers had been looking at the Coal Sack from the Southern Hemisphere for centuries: it was a dark nebula that mostly blotted out the stars behind it and within it. It had a little light, but those stars were struggling to make any of it look more like a gaping void. Sam was right about the planets that might be developing within it, but evidently there was something in there now.

What he knew about it made Dean nervous. He didn't like deep dark regions of space anymore. None of them wanted to be anywhere they couldn't see the stars clearly.

"Cas is whining, but he's otherwise right," explained _Gabriel. _"And now that I think about it…why haven't I thought about it before?" He paused, no doubt debating and arguing with his brothers and sisters. "None of us have thought about it before! It's like we've been told to ignore it up until now! And to never, ever go there. Why the hell…what's so special about it? It's a _cloud_."

"But that's where the trail leads?" Jo asked them all.

_Gabriel_ all but snarled, distinctly unhappy. "Another piece of programming – and it is programmed into us, and we never knew! – that must have broken along with the rest of the dark Fleet's minds, if that's where they're headed. _Naomi_'s promising to send us all the counterprogramming, she says it's necessary and we've got to go faster and she sounds _freaked!_ But that's not the point!"

Dean paced in a quick and angry circle around the kitchen that he'd been in when this conversation had started up – he hadn't bothered to leave and had been somewhat amused by the sight of the images of his brother and his friend walking through the furniture and equipment in there as they moved around their respective spaces. He was no longer amused in any way. "You guys have no-fly zones programmed in? Since when?"

Behind him, the door hissed open and he wasn't at all surprised when Cas walked into the room and directly into his personal space, seeking the anchor and reassurance that his bond with Dean provided. The human wrapped his arms around his companion and held on to him automatically, digging his fingers into flesh too sturdy to bruise so easily. Evidently rattled beyond all speaking, Cas hid his eyes behind Dean's shoulder and those black wings materialized again, mantling around the pair of them and filling the human's entire field of vision with black feathers, down which little sparks of anger and distress ran intermittently, flashing in the corner of his eyes.

It was like being inside a thundercloud, if thunderclouds could breathe against his skin. Dean had some pretty good memories associated with those imaginary wings now, but he remembered all too clearly that the visual flourish was almost always a warning sign, an evocative danger signal. _I am bigger than you think I am,_ Cas was saying without words. _I am more powerful than I look. Be warned, and do not threaten me or mine!_

"I don't know since when, Dean," said Cas. He no longer sounded scared. He sounded _furious_, not raging but ice cold, a tone of voice that said unconditionally that someone was going to get hurt or otherwise regret making him mad.

Somewhere in the very back of his mind, Dean heard the audio feed from the other two ships cut off, making him think that the two of them were once again alone, or at least as alone as _Castiel_ ever got flying with nine other ships all around him.

Years ago he would have pushed Cas away before very long, used to keeping a no-fly zone of his own against everyone except maybe Sam. Now he knew better. The last time he'd seen Cas this upset, _Michael_ had tried to wrap a choke chain around him and pull hard.

Evidently that had only been the latest and most obvious of who knew how many invisible leashes.

"Why are we going into the Coal Sack, Cas?" Dean asked, keeping his voice as steady as possible as if checking off questions on a list.

"That's where the trail leads."

"Okay. Why don't you want to go there?"

"We're not supposed to."

"Says who?"

"I don't know."

"What happens if you do?"

"I don't know. It's not that clear. The place itself doesn't frighten me. I can think about it. I can tell you anything about it that you want to know."

"Okay, that might be useful –"

"But it's hard to think about going there. I don't want to go. I truly don't."

"Hmm." Dean ran one of his hands up and down the muscles in his companion's back, which were tensed as if Cas was expecting to fight for his life or face something that terrified him. "If you were human – just human, I mean – that'd sound posthypnotic. Something trained into you that you were then trained to forget."

"I think it is. But I didn't know it was there. I don't know what else is there, what else I've been told not to think about." Suddenly, he made a soft sound, almost like a gasp and almost like an _oh!_ of realization. The knots in his shoulders relaxed and went away. "As we get closer, I will be able to. The prohibition is fading."

"That counterprogram?"

"Yes. It's not telling me anything about _why_ I shouldn't go there, but I no longer want to turn around and go somewhere else. And _Naomi_ won't tell anyone why the prohibition was necessary. Or what she's so worried about the dark Fleet finding there. She's keeping secrets from us, Dean!"

"Bitch," Dean said supportively, but not very helpfully. "Does anyone else have any idea why?"

"No. I'd tell you if I knew. We'll keep asking her until we get some answers, but at the speed we're traveling and where we are relative to anything else no one can afford to drop back into real space and try to get information from anyone else."

Dean thought about it for a moment. "Why don't I look?"

Cas pulled away just enough to tip his head to one side interrogatively. As he forgot about them, having made his point, the wings started to become transparent and fade from view. At the very least, the little sparks of lightning that had been moving across them stopped.

"You've been programmed not to think about it, right? But there's nothing stopping me from digging through your databanks. That's passive, right? You can't think about it, but if I ask for something, you've got to give it to me. You may not know that you know something."

"Yes…" The starship thought it over. "But you don't know what to ask for, and neither do I."

Dean shrugged. "So I ask for everything and scan. I can read, Cas, just not as fast as you can. It'll have to do." A thought occurred to him, prompted by the way Cas had been acting and the memories of the last time something like this had happened. He considered whether or not to speak it aloud.

"What are you thinking, Dean?"

As if keeping quiet had ever been an option. Cas could read him too well. "Ah…I was just thinking that we know you can get around some pretty basic programming as long as I tell you to." _That you'll listen to my voice above all others._ "I just need to figure out the right question. Before we get there. And preferably, before we get shot at. I wonder what the hell they want with the place?"

He didn't get any answers. But he could feel, beneath his feet and thrumming through his body, the vibration of powerful flight engines picking up the pace as they raced on to a dark nebula where, apparently, the ships of the Fleet thought they weren't supposed to go.

* * *

_to be continued_


	9. Interlude: Bugs

**Interlude: Bugs**

ON WITH THE SHOW!

_The World Later Called_ _Shadow by Inferior Beings: Before_

It began with the fire.

There had been things before that, of course, endless things, and all the same. They were the only sentient minds in the universe, and the world – this world, here – was the universe. They were the people, superior to animals, pure and clever.

In their raw forms, they looked like dark clouds or like smoke. If anyone with a mind to reason and comprehend had ever gotten close enough to look, then they might have noticed that the people were more like swarms. But that hypothetical rival would have had to survive the doing of it, and there had never been any other creature with the wits to do so. The people were sure that there was not anything else like them on this world, and the sky was a fixed and airless ceiling past which they could not go, and if they could not, then nothing could, because they were the pinnacle of evolution.

They had ascended from swarms of thousands of tiny insects, many acting as one. Over time, each member, each drone, had shrunk and become cells of a whole that thought deep and complex thoughts as an individual, a self. The components of their bodies had become so small they no longer resembled living creatures to the naked eye, but rather seemed only fragments when many such clumped together. They stopped thinking when they broke apart, but when they reformed and reached the critical mass necessary for conscious thought they were born anew, over and over again. They traded encoded memories as easily as they traded pieces of themselves.

It was their world, and they were legion. When they needed to hunt, or merely to play in different ways, they could take hosts for themselves. They favored the use of the animals with claws, which were unthinking but efficient, and useful to dwell within. The swarms coexisted with the beasts, which carried out such biological functions as synthesizing the rarer chemicals they needed from the parts of the world both animal and riding swarm consumed. The beasts were the most convenient hosts because of their size and their position at the almost top of the food chain. But their brains were stupid and stunted and easily controllable when the swarms infested them at will and abandoned them when the animals ceased to be useful.

The swarms were intelligent, sentient, creative, and not, in their own minds, cruel. The complexity of their movements and the interactions of their components transmitted information to the whole and to others like them. They thought. They thought _I_, and they thought _we_. They spoke to each other and they lived. They were kings of the universe, as far as they understood a concept that they had never had to defend.

And when they needed to ride the winds and move freely then they could do that too.

And then there had been the fire.

Two of them had gone to see what it was, naked and shapeless in the night, because there had been no lightning strike, no storm, although there was a new scent on the air and when it had blown in a wind that one of them could taste then it had tasted it and wondered. It tasted of _somewhere else_. Of _something_ else than the endless turn of the world that they ruled.

By the little fire – no lightning had started that – there was a new animal that walked on two legs like the hunter beasts, but was so much smaller and lighter.

They tried out the shape for themselves, to see what it felt like.

There was a noise, once, twice, and again, and the new animal fled. Its movements interested the swarms, but not as much as the thing that ripped through one of them.

The loss of individual components, the small cells, was nothing to the swarm that had been hit, especially not compared to the taste of the thing.

It was metal, a small pellet and not ripped-from-the-ground and impure-tasting raw: refined and forged and shaped in a way entirely new.

Metal was a treasure, on this world, and this creature had so much that it could throw it away. The shadows followed the machine – more metal, and lightning-tasting energy in it! – across their territory, riding the winds in pursuit and letting it lead them to another one. While the new animals remained on their world, the swarms watched from the shadows they resembled as new worlds and new ideas opened up to them.

Then the creatures left, up into the sky and gone.

So there were animals in the sky. Perhaps the people should have gone along with them, to find out what the sky was like and how best they could use it. But they thought of this only afterwards, and there were no more sky animals for some time.

Then others had come, and observation gave the swarms even more ideas to consider. The animals were not all that different from the hunting beasts, but the differences! The strangers had metal worked in such intricacy that they could use it to fly up and down to the _stars!_ Their delicate paws and clever fingers changed the world around them. They spoke to each other in complex patterns of sound and movement rather than chemical transmission and reception of scent and reflection and the transmission of interchangeable swarm members. They traveled in groups. They could do things that the swarms had never seen, but evoked emotions in the observers that…

The swarms had been the dominant form of life on the world for as long as they could remember, for as long as it had mattered. The swarms had never before felt _jealous_.

They reluctantly had to admit, amongst themselves, that the strangers were not only intelligent but that _the invaders_ had the edge on them.

Clearly this was intolerable, incorrect, and must be remedied in some thorough and unconditional manner. The swarms were the kings of the world, and everything in the world belonged to them.

But the invaders tasted enough like the beasts that what worked when they wanted to ride the latter might work on the former…

The first time the invaded invader died. The second time it rejected the swarm, and later died, screaming and alone and reeking of fear and panic. The third time, when the swarm fell onto and into it while it slept, the invader became so sick that the swarm left before it could be harmed as a consequence of the creature's physical distress. But the pioneering swarms learned a little more every time.

The fourth time the merging worked well enough, for now. They would get better, with practice. There were enough of them all across the world that they could have taken every one of the invaders and many, many more, but for the moment they explored only. And the swarms began to learn just what these – people, how did they dare to think that they were people? – were. They began to learn what the invaders from the sky, who challenged the rule of the people over the world, could do. And, even better, they began to find out just what the swarms of _Shadow, they call it Shadow, they call_ us _shadows and they think us only dreams and nightmares_ could do with them.

The skies, full of _others_, had opened up and brought the universe outside of the world in. Some of it tasted…interesting, and some of it could be used. With thought. With care. With time.

Exactly what they wanted was simple. They were the rulers of the world, and clearly the rest of the universe was part of the world. They would own it and consume it and shape it too, now that they knew there were things of interest to them out there, and now that they could use the invaders to carry them up to the stars. Anything else, any other outcome, was impossible and unnatural. Anything else would go against millennia of rule.

Exactly how they were going to restore the balance was likely to be less simple. But they were clever. They would find a way.

* * *

_to be continued_

**Author's Note:** Regular chapters will resume shortly.


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